Di Wang's Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain is an illuminating study of how secret societies operated in early twentieth-century Sichuan and how they have been understood. It is written as a micro-history focused on a single secret society leader and the young female student who interviewed him as part of an undergraduate research project in 1945. Wang then uncovers and interprets these events in light of a wealth of knowledge of local social and cultural history.

Shen Baoyuan was a student in the Sociology Department of Yenching University. As part of her fieldwork requirement she spent a month in a town near Chengdu and developed a friendship with the wife and daughter of Lei Mingyuan, who was a local master in the Paoge or Gowned Brothers society, whose power was pervasive in the area. Her account of the family enables Wang to provide an unusually detailed and evocative description of the operations of Lei and the Paoge in the town. The book begins with a dramatic incident that had taken place a few years earlier when Lei Mingyuan, then at the height of his power, murdered his daughter and her lover by publicly shooting and then drowning them. The incident foregrounds not only the capacity of secret societies to use violence outside the control of the state, but also the way in which such violence was sanctioned within local concepts of justice. Wang depicts Lei as having embraced a code of ethics according to which he had little choice but to retrieve his honor through this violent act.

This leads into chapters that discuss the organizational structures of the Paoge, its religious rituals and texts, its somewhat flamboyant secret codes, and its leaders’ power to adjudicate regional disputes and thus influence and even control the local state. This is the side of secret societies with which readers may be more familiar, since its nominal secrecy has given it a longstanding fascination. However, the book also reveals new sides to the societies. The point that there was not a single Paoge structure, but rather several competing entities under the same name, is well taken. Also very interesting is the detailed description of how, as a result of the secret societies’ participation as righteous rebels in the 1911 revolution in Sichuan, they pervaded the Republican state in the province. From this point of view, as Wang points out, calling the organizations “secret” is misleading, even though it is unavoidable because their history and culture of secrecy was a central part of their identity.

The second half of the book concerns Lei Mingyuan's personal story—his rise from tenant farmer to Paoge master and then his fall. By the time of Shen Baoyuan's visit, he was a flashy (for example, he had permed hair) but impoverished and opium-addicted gangster whose power was fading away, so that he was happy to give interviews and teach visiting university students how to shoot a pistol. The point Wang makes here is that despite the apparent power displayed in the murder of his daughter, Lei continued to be constrained by the cultural conventions of the society within which he was operating. A fascinating chapter discusses the role local Paoge members, most but not all of whom were aligned with the Nationalist Party, played in the Communist Revolution. Their outcomes varied, apparently almost randomly, from execution for being members of the society to standing on the podium beside Mao Zedong at the inauguration of the People's Republic, so that Wang charmingly confesses at one point that “history is baffling” (p. 171).

Woven through this story of Lei Mingyuan is the story of Shen Baoyuan, which Wang uses to lead us lightly through the historiography of the secret societies and how that has shaped our knowledge of them. Shen was a student of Lin Yaohua and other prominent Chinese sociologists of the day, so that the approach that she brought to her studies reflected their interests. She was also, Wang argues, influenced by the fashionable leftist thinking of the day. Wang contrasts her relatively sympathetic approach to Lei Mingyuan, which allows for Paoge members’ self-identification with the righteous brotherhoods of Chinese literature and history, with the strongly condemnatory approach of local history materials compiled under the People's Republic. He concludes that perhaps E. J. Hobsbawm's ideas of social banditry are the most helpful for understanding the society.

Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain adds to the recent flourishing of studies of Sichuan in the Republican period, which include Isabel Crook and Christina Gilmartin's study of a county near Chongqing in much the same period, and Kristin Stapleton's historical study of 1920s Chengdu based around Ba Jin's novel Family (Jia).Footnote ¹ All these books are not only fascinating in their content for the academic reader and researcher, but also wonderfully approachable in their style: they should make it possible to teach some great undergraduate courses.