Politics, Intellectuals and Walled Villages in Modern China 1852-1937

Abstract

This thesis will show that, within the modern political discourse applied to China, walled villages were inevitably involved in a long-term state-building process in the Republican period, which aimed to modernize China by mobilizing the grassroots and centralizing power. Beyond the reach of local government, walled villages at first were targeted as local forces after 1927, then transformed under the leadership of the KMT regime to stabilize and control local society in some parts of north China. During the KMT’s encirclement campaigns against the CCP and its bases in the 1930s, walled villages were introduced and promoted in south China. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT, not only instrumentalized walled villages as his method of militarization but also developed walled villages into a prototype of modern China in rural areas, making it a nation-wide phenomenon. More than being shaped as local objects, walled villages deeply influenced China’s preparation for the potential invasion from Japan and played a significant role in its national defense strategy. This was especially the case with the construction of walled villages initiated in north China before Japan launched a full-scale war in 1937. Through examining walled villages in the global circulation of modernity, this thesis will demonstrate that they gave the perception of backward China solid evidence and a visible shape as well. Walled villages enabled intellectuals from the West and China to gradually locate China’s retardation in its rural areas and facilitated a transnational interaction of those intellectuals, creating a widely known image of backward China.