The Chinese military is a slim field in western sinology, certainly as compared to intellectual history. This may be because intellectuals prefer to write intellectual history. Soldiers and the military are less appealing, except to former soldiers, and yet the importance of the military and of warfare in modern Chinese history is overwhelming. Both the Guomindang and the Communist Party came to power through war. The wars were fought by men imbued with military culture. Schillinger's study of the evolution of China's modern military culture is a welcome addition to our knowledge of this key aspect of modern China.
There has been no single tradition of military culture in China, traditional or modern. Schillinger does not accept the long-standing trope that in the Chinese tradition the military was slighted in favor of the civil (zhong wen qing wu 重文情武). Though bureaucrats often ruled the empire, dynasty after dynasty came to power through the use of military force. The martial culture on which the state's military was based was strong. And martial figures have been central characters in popular culture, from the archpatriot Yue Fei 岳飛 to the knights errant(wuxia 武侠), the toughs of the Water Margin. In the late Qing one of the most popular heroes was Huo Yuanjia 霍元甲, the martial arts tyro who trounced Russian and Scottish heavyweights. The martial culture was never completely subordinate to the civil.
This study is set in a critical period of history. In the space of a decade, China suffered two enormous shocks. The first was China's defeat by Japan in the Jiawu War (Jiawu zhanzheng 甲午戰争) (1895). (The Chinese name for the war seems more appropriate than the later Japanese name, the First Sino-Japanese War). The second was the cancellation of the imperial examination system in 1905, which left a whole cohort of talented young men without a future career. Out of these two shocks came the rapid rise of the modern Chinese army. National defense urgently required massive spending on the military, while many of the talented young men enrolled in the new military schools.
One aspect of the emergence of China's modern martial culture was an admiration for discipline and smartness, the explicit rejection of the soft, decaying old system. One reading of this admiration is a stress on masculinity over femininity. As an illustration of China's “crisis of masculinity” Schillinger uses a celebrated Japanese print that shows tall, bearded Japanese officers, dressed in European naval uniforms (masculine), taking the surrender at the end of the Jiawu War from bowing Chinese civil officials in silken gowns, their hair in queues (feminine). The image does show the triumph of military over civil, but it has some less overt messages. One is a crisis of Japanese masculinity, as measured in physical characteristics; the Japanese officers are shown taller and more heavily bearded than they were in real life. Another is that the surrender is being taken by naval officers, showing the dominance of the navy within the Japanese armed forces. This was the navy that had destroyed China's fledgling navy and won the war for Japan.
China's new martial culture that grew out of the humiliation of defeat was based on Germany's forceful martial culture, the defining characteristic of the new European nation, a nation that came into being after Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War (1871). The development of China's new culture was mediated, ironically, through Japan. The creation of a military nation (junguo 軍國), first in Germany, then in Japan and in China, was exciting to governments. Civilian reformers talked about new political systems but they lacked political power. The men who held that power were willing to spend lavishly on the military, in the name of protecting the state. In the late Qing money was poured into creating new armed forces, and into the creation of a new martial culture.
The scope of German/Japanese influence within the Chinese military was fundamental, from training, to organisation, to armaments, to strategy and tactics, to war games. The martial culture that developed in tandem with military reform helped to produce the formal military that has lasted to this day. The championing of guerrilla warfare as an intrinsically Chinese system rooted in popular culture did not last.
The book is full of fascinating descriptions of aspects of military training and the instilling of martial culture: gymnastics, callisthenics, marching, the goose step, and techniques to boost morale, such as developing esprit de corps through studying and singing. The techniques were implemented in military schools, and in the New Army in the last years of the Qing. Unfortunately many went into abeyance in the turbulent years of the early Republic. With some exceptions, the men of the warlord armies deserved their common name of “grey rats.” But the new martial culture came back. Most of its practices introduced in the late Qing have survived to the present day. The only rival to the PLA in goose-stepping are the honor guards of the ROC military.
One key element of modern militaries is a uniform. Officers of many armies adorn themselves in dress uniforms covered with insignia, gold braid, decorations and sashes, swords and side arms. Common soldiers wear only one uniform, put together from a menu of tunics or jackets, trousers or breeches, puttees or boots, caps or helmets and belts, usually simple and unadorned. The degree to which uniforms can be equated with fighting ability and masculinity is unclear. Some of the most fearsome soldiers in the world are the men of the kilted Highland regiments. Some of the most inadequate battlefield soldiers have been the most gorgeously attired, viz. the officers of the Tsarist armies.
In China the wearing of western military uniforms was accompanied by the gradual abandonment of traditional civilian clothing. This meant the demise of long gowns and embroidered robes. For a while Japanese-influenced Zhongshan jackets became the standard clothing for men, but they too were replaced by drab dark business suits, which convey no sense of a Chinese tradition at all. This is sad, given that other states—India and much of the Arab world—have kept at least parts of traditional male clothing.
Schillinger reminds us that German influence in China up until the end of the First World War was considerable. The German interest in China can be seen as an extension of the Drang nach Osten (Push to the East), German expansionism into Eastern Europe. German influence has been underrated in Chinese and western scholarship. One of the greatest western works on China was Ferdinand von Richthofen's China, Ergebnisse eigener Reisen (China, Descriptions of My Own Travels). This detailed geography based on his travels throughout China started publication in 1877. In the late Qing German advisors, engineers, academics, businessmen, and missionaries were at work in many parts of China, most notably in Shandong. Their work came to a sudden end in 1918, not to be taken up again until the 1930s, when Chiang Kai-shek brought in German military advisors to upgrade his armies. German companies such as Siemens conducted major projects in many parts of China. Sinology survived very strongly in Germany until the rise of the Nazis and the emigration of many of its most prominent practitioners, who were Jewish. The revived tradition of careful, thorough-going research is demonstrated in this meticulous work, leavened by postmodernist insights.
