No one even with only a casual interest in Chinese history can be unaware that China's capacity for war in the last few centuries has proved truly awesome. In the middle of the eighteenth century Qing armies numbering some 150,000 troops marched into central Asia. After many campaigns some of which continued for nearly two years, they rid China finally of the menace from the desert that had caused so much havoc in the past. In the process they exterminated the Zunghars as a people. In the nineteenth century, China fought wars with nearly all the major powers: England in the Opium War of 1839–42 and several times thereafter; France in the 1880s; and Japan in the 1890s. In 1900 it took on all of them at the same time. Civil war too was a frequent occurrence. The Taiping Rebellion of 1852–64 exacted casualties that should be counted in the tens of millions, and this was merely the most devastating of a series of rebellions. The scale of war in the twentieth century has proved even more spectacular. Warlord wars, fighting between the nationalists and communists, and the War of Resistance against Japan ravaged China until the communist victory in 1949.

From the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries three agrarian states—Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian—struggled for power over the heartland of the Eurasian continent. Each had dynamic central leaders mobilizing agrarian surpluses based on drastically different ecologies, institutions, and military structures. When the dust cleared, by 1760, only two survived.

In a recent article published in the Journal of Military History, Arthur Waldron noted that war in Chinese history has been ‘treated at best as a largely unexamined context’. One has only to look at the cursory treatment given by most textbooks to the incessant civil wars of China's ‘warlord’ period (usually dated from 1916 to 1926) to see the truth of this statement. In the above article, Waldron seeks to remedy some of this neglect by pointing out the important relationship in this period between war and the course of modern Chinese nationalism. Although less ambitious, this article also seeks to explore a more specific, yet also largely unexamined, aspect of this relationship, namely the emergence of anti-militarism, or more specifically anti-warlordism, as a defining theme in modern Chinese nationalism.

Previous studies of the rise of warlordism have focused on the devolution of power after the Taiping Rebellion and the failure of political leaders to create a workable order after the 1911 Revolution. This article offers an initial exploration of the fiscal background. Foreign indemnities imposed after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and largescale borrowing by the Qing before 1911 and by the Republic subsequently resulted in a severe fiscal crisis for the central state, with the following consequences.

Reviewing his long reign in 1792, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) hailed his military triumphs as one of its central accomplishments. To underscore the importance he ascribed to these successes, he began to style himself ‘Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories’ (Shi Quan Lao Ren), after an essay in which he boldly declared he had surpassed, in ‘Ten Complete Military Victories’ (Shi Quan Wu Gong), the far-reaching westward expansions of the great Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Such an assertion, together with the program of commemoration discussed below, served to justify the immense expense incurred by frequent long-distance campaigning; to elevate all these wars to an unimpeachable level of splendor even though some were distinctly less glorious than others; and to align the Manchu Qing dynasty (16–191 i) with two of the greatest native dynasties of Chinese history and the Qianlong Emperor personally with some of the great figures of the past.

Nie Er (1912–1935), a young Communist musician from Yunnan, could not possibly have imagined that when he wrote this patriotic song (with lyrics by the left-wing writer Tian Han [1898–1968]) for the 1935 film Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun ernü) it would soon become one of the most popular tunes in China. The overwhelming success of the song reflected a nation, long frustrated by imperialist (especially Japanese) aggression, thwarted reforms, domestic armed conflicts, and government ineptitude, venting its anger and crying out for a solution. When the Japanese invaded China two years later, ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was rapidly transformed into the quintessential song of resistance against Japan, sung at schools, in the army, at rallies, and on the streets. The song was influential in capturing the hearts and minds of millions during China's eight-year War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945); its impact, in the words of one contemporary song critic, was ‘similar to that of the “Marseillaise” [in the French Revolution]’. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power in it adopted the song as the official national anthem.

There is a striking disconnect between the imaginative range of interests which preoccupy historians of World Wars I and II in Europe and North America and the much more narrow political concerns of China historians working on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. Since Jacoby and White's Thunder Out of China (1946) and Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism (1966), Western historiography on the Sino-Japanese War has focused not on the war itself but on the continuing political struggle for supremacy between the Communists and Nationalists. The war is seen as the key to the eventual triumph of the Communists over Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists by 1949. Other issues like the military history of the war itself or its long-term impact on Chinese society and culture have received scant attention.

General Zhang Zizhong, commander of the eight divisions that constituted the Chinese 33rd Army Group, was killed at approximately 4:00 P.M. on May 16, 1940, in fighting at Shilichangshan (‘Ten li mountain’) near Nanguadian in Northern Hubei. The battle was one engagement of the Zaoyang-Yichang campaign that rumbled through late spring of that year. Surrounded by the Japanese, his forces had refused either to retreat or to surrender. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, General Zhang had been wounded seven times in all, by grenade, bullet, and finally by bayonet. The victorious Japanese realized Zhang's identity only when a major discovered, in the left breast pocket of his blood-soaked yellow uniform, a fine gold pen engraved with his name. The major quickly summoned senior officers; they ordered a stretcher brought and the body was carried away from the battlefield. (This was observed, through half-opened eyes, by Zhang's long-time associate, the Chinese major Ma Xiaotang, who lay nearby, bleeding from a bayonet wound, and who later gasped out the story to Chinese as he died).

Communist sources record that between 20 August and 5 December 1940, the Eighth Route Army (8RA) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fought 1,824 large and small engagements with Japanese and puppet troops from the plains of Hebei to the mountains of Shanxi. These engagements are known collectively as ‘the Battle of the Hundred Regiments’ and they are the subject of this essay.

On 25th July 1894, the Japanese navy sank the Chinese man-of-war Gaosheng without warning and thus officially started the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The war was a culmination of the rivalries between the two countries for two decades. Japan, strengthened by its Meiji reforms, and still growing in power, wanted to extend its power within the Korean peninsula. China, on the other hand, was desperately clinging to its influence over its largest, oldest and last vassal. The was was watched with great interest by the European powers as a litmus test of the relative success of the modernization programs carried out by the two countries in the years before. Many observers expected a real fight to be at hand. But this was not to be. The Chinese army was thoroughly beaten in one battle after another: in Pingrang (September 1894), Lushun (November 1894), and Weihaiwei (February 1895). Meanwhile, the Chinese Beiyang Fleet was also heavily beaten by the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Yellow Sea (September 1894). By March 1895, Beijing had come under the Japanese threat. In April, the Chinese government was forced to sue for peace under humiliating terms.

Effective combat performance depends on the following: First, there must be a sound command structure capable of making rational decisions. Second, there must be efficient means of communication to transmit decisions through the chain of command and to give the commanders continuous control over their units. There must also be sufficient transportation to allow the units to execute their mission in a timely way. Third, there must be adequate quality and quantity of weapons and supplies commensurable with the given military mission. Fourth, there must be high-quality soldiers at all levels able to perform their duties competently. Finally, the entire military effort must be guided by clear and coherent strategic thinking.