NEW STATES OF WAR: COMMUNIST AND NATIONALIST WARFARE AND STATE BUILDING (1928-1934)*

HANs VAN DE VEN

Warlord warfare between 1916 and 1928 was waged between stand• ing infantry armies. These wars were of short duration and aimed at the control of large cities, railroad lines, and rivers. Local popu• lations remained relatively unaffected by such campaigns. The mil• itaries that fought them imitated pre- European models, which have been called 'institutionalized warfare' .1 In such warfare in Europe, armies were centrally controlled. Uniforms, laws, rituals, and barracks clearly separated the civil and the military realms, and battles took place in territories and timespans bounded by a series of convention and laws. When World War I began in Europe, the expectation was that the conflict would be a short, if mighty, clash. This changed only as these armies became stuck in trenches. The fighting then became a long war of attrition, seemingly pointless, but nonetheless consuming huge numbers of the population and with often improvised state structures geared toward mobilizing all avail• able human and material resources, in the process laying the found• ations for the social welfare state. Institutionalized warfare made way for total war. Arthur Waldron's treatment of warlord warfare in 's turning point is important in forcing us to take a less condemnatory approach to the warlords and bringing the impact of warlord warfare, espe• cially for the creation of institutional and cultural vacuums in which new developments became possible, into our understanding of historical change. Waldron's work also offers a detailed and insight• ful discussion of the Zhili-Fengtian war of 1924, drawing us skilfully into the various battles that made up this war, the logistical efforts

* I acknowledge with gratitude the helpful criticisms of Ch'en Yung-fa, Joseph Esherick, and an anonymous reviewer of Brill Academic Publishers. 1 KJ. Holsti, The state, war and the state ef war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 322 by both sides, and the larger political context from which it gained its meaning. Waldron's comparison of the Zhili-Fengtian War with the total warfare of World War I no doubt was intended as a heuristic device. As such, it succeeds in forcing us to consider the effects of the war in undermining the legitimacy of the Northern Government and in creating new political and cultural possibilities.2 However, one won• ders whether that comparison does not obscure as much, both in terms of the nature of that warfare and its political and cultural effects, as it elucidates. The Zhili-Fengtian war, after all, still sought to replicate institutionalized warfare, not the total warfare that emerged in World War I. Neither universal recruitment nor total social or econ• omic mobilization were attempted. As to its consequences, Chiang Kai-shek's victory in 1928, which was, as Waldron argues, made pos• sible in part by the institutional and military vacuums that resulted from the Zhili-Fengtian war, cannot be typified as 'the assumption of control by the Guomindang with its new and stable political and mili• tary institutions'. 3 Even if that statement was intended to bring clo• sure to his study, it is nonetheless true that continued civil war, which during the War of the Central Plains in 1930 pitted 300,000 of Chiang's troops against 700,000 of his opponents, belied that image of stability. More fundamentally, warlord warfare was different even from insti• tutionalized warfare. Armies during the warlord period were not con• trolled by a unified bureaucracy and there was no such thing as a unified officers corps. Systems of recruitment were neither national nor bureaucratized. Nor were the armies themselves well integrated, and they shook loose units that then often became bandits, or incor• porated bandit groups into their ranks. The distinctions between the civil and the military had been eroded, as army units penetrated fiscal, economic, and administrative organs, and they, in turn, the army. Laws meant little and the armies lacked the elaborate con• ventions and rituals of European armies as well as the careful induc• tion of troops and officers into the state's potentially most violent and hence most dangerous arm. Personal relations and local bonds replaced formal bureaucratic relations and procedures. Wars spread

2 Arthur Waldron, From war to : China's fuming point, 1924-5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5, 9. 3 Ibid., 280.