Martial Arts, Apocalypse, and Counterrevolutionaries: Huidaomen and Rural Governance in Modern China, 1919-1961

My dissertation is a socio-political microhistory on anarchic forms of rural power structure. This study examines the role of huidaomen, especially self-defense associations and redemptive societies, in the cultural nexus of power in rural China. By analyzing their participation and intervention in local elections, lineage conflicts, defense against banditry, and merchant networks, I argue that the Nationalist Government’s state penetration in rural China was a bureaucratic failure due to its poor management of informal power structure in local communities. It also explores how the Communist Revolution abruptly ended such existing informal power channels during the regime-change period. The anarchic rural political environment was finally destroyed by the Communists’ three waves of Anti-Huidaomen Campaigns from 1950 to 1961. My study makes two contributions to the field of modern Chinese history. First, my dissertation introduces a critical but overlooked subject in local societies across China. With official statistics showing more than thirteen million lay members in the huidaomen nationwide in 1949, huidaomen were the largest non-state participants in local governance. Despite some scholarly research on their role in peasant rebellions based on Qing Dynasty legal cases, scholars know almost nothing about the presence of these societies in the twentieth century. My study focuses on the huidaomen without the presence of large-scale rebellions, which illustrates their role in an everyday setting and avoids the danger of labeling them indiscriminately as rebels. Second, my project pioneers the promise and challenges of using new and rare forms of internal public security files such as interrogations, confessions, and verdicts in the PRC. Relying on over a hundred complete criminal cases from the CCP’s Public Security Bureau in the 1950s that deal with legal cases of both the Republican era and the early PRC, my dissertation is an unprecedented experiment in using systematic internal public security documents produced by the CCP as historical sources