In Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China, Kate Merkel-Hess explores the domestic world of some of the most powerful men in modern Chinese history. Pushing back against the trend in studies of Chinese warlords which has, since the 1960s, dissociated them from their personal circumstances, Merkel-Hess redirects our attention to the domestic lives of warlords as “politically and ideologically vital” (p. 12). She therefore takes us back to the “gossip columns” to uncover the domestic lives of these men, utilizing an impressive array of non-traditional sources, including pictorials, fashion notes, jokes, poetry and other “detritus” of the Republican press. Alongside these newspaper sources, the book makes excellent use of recently available archival materials, including the correspondence between Zhang Xueliang and Song Meiling held at Columbia University.
The study brings together two branches of the historiography on the Republican era which have largely been treated separately: the story of warlord violence and China's political disintegration in the 1920s–1930s, and the dramatic cultural and social changes of this period, including a radical transformation in women's position. Indeed, the book convincingly demonstrates that we cannot understand these warlords’ careers as both violent militarists and modernizing reformers if we leave women out of the picture. Warlords used overt displays of domesticity and their wives’ philanthropic activities to downplay the threat they represented, and, vice versa, both the KMT and CCP sought to domesticate them, making them subservient to the nation. In Merkel-Hess's analysis the domestic and political were thus deeply intertwined: “The relationship between domesticity and militarism is thus at the core of the rise and fall of warlordism in twentieth century China” (p. 8).
The book also contributes to a vibrant discussion about women's public political participation and advancing status in Republican, and especially wartime, China. Just as warlords used their domestic lives to cultivate their public personas and tone down their military threat, warlord wives, concubines and daughters, through their philanthropic activities designed to bolster their husbands’ careers, became increasingly visible public figures and political actors in their own right. Their views on women's liberation were much more diverse and radical than we might have expected. Presenting a broader view of the Women's New Life Movement than previous studies have depicted, Merkel-Hess challenges us to think of it as ideologically diverse, decentring more conservative figures such as Song Meiling.
Organized chronologically, chapters two to five each focus on a single warlord's relationship with his wife, concubine or daughter. Chapter one uncovers the methodological problems of actually finding these “First Ladies of China.” These women left no biographies or personal papers, and with public profiles normally attached to the rise and fall of their partners’ political careers, they come in and out of view. In the case of “Madame Yan Xishan” for example, it is unclear if newspapers are talking about his first wife Xu Zhuqing, or his concubine Xu Lansen.
Merkel-Hess provides us with a valuable picture of elite women's military and philanthropic activity outside the urban centres we are familiar with. Chapter two explores the military activity and left-wing activism of Guo Dejie, concubine of Guangxi warlord Li Zongren. Guo mobilized Guangxi women during the Northern Expedition and Second Sino-Japanese War. In her work for the New Life Movement in Guangxi she adopted a much more radical stance towards women's liberation than the current narratives of the Movement depict. Guo advocated that women work on the battlefield frontlines and championed their inherent equality and rights to citizenship with men.
The analysis is perhaps strongest in chapter three, where the relationship between Feng Yuxiang and Li Dequan is archetypal of the dynamic that Merkel-Hess presents as her main argument: Li was central to Feng's modern public persona and he used his domestic image to soften his political threat, while Li's embrace of her roles as wife and mother was crucial to her pathway to a political career as Minister for Health and leader of the Chinese Red Cross after 1949.
The book not only reconstructs the lives and public activities of these women but also offers a fascinating analysis of how these women have been constructed in Chinese popular and state-sponsored historical narratives since the 1980s. This comes through most adeptly in chapters four and five, which focus respectively on the relationships between Fu Zuoyi and his daughter Fu Dong, and Zhang Xueliang and his second wife Zhao Yidi. In an era of declining birth rates and a crisis in eldercare, the state seeks to stress the values of filial piety and family harmony. Fu Dong, who, working as an underground communist influenced her father to surrender Beijing in the winter of 1948, has been transformed into a modern Mulan, who rescues her family and the state. Meanwhile, Zhao Yidi's constant love for Zhang Xueliang during his half-century-long confinement after the Xi'an Incident redeems him from being a playboy and traitor to a devoted husband and national hero.
Although not a warlord wife, Song Meiling appears throughout the book as a point of comparison to the political activity and feminist stance taken by these other leading ladies of China. Questions remain over how far warlord wives’ careers were distinctive from the lives of other political figures and civilian leaders of Republican China. Like Song, many of these women (and some of their warlords) were Christian-educated or converted to Christianity, which Merkel-Hess acknowledges as an important social network for the KMT elite (p. 144). To what extent their Christian views or the education that their wives received influenced these warlords’ family values and their domestic lives, is an avenue of inquiry which merits future attention.
Overall, by skilfully drawing our attention to the interweaving of the domestic and political in the lives and careers of the warlords and their female relatives, the book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of warlord studies and Chinese women's history. It would be of interest to researchers and teachers in the fields of Chinese studies, military history, gender studies, history of emotions and family history.
