Enlisting Citizens: Compulsory Conscription Laws and the Military Mobilization in Republican China, 1933-1944

• In Event: Asian Citizenship from “Above” and “Below”: Complicating Formal Modes of Belonging

Abstract

This paper examines the rarely studied topic of the soldier figure constructed in military laws, soldier education materials, as well as military and political propaganda in Republican China from the 1930s and the 1940s. The compulsory conscription laws, the 1934 New Life Movement propaganda and the 1944 Campaign of Mobilizing the Educated Youth to Join the Army to be discussed in this paper revealed the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD)’ state-building project of creating a national identity among the people as militarized, politicized, disciplined and morally cultivated citizens. However, the real-life conditions of the recruited conscripts and the writings by conscripted student soldiers showed that the GMD’s state-building program met resistance and complication from the society. This paper is based on a variety of recently available sources, to include army textbooks, military laws, Chiang Kai-shek diaries, and writings by student soldiers in the Chinese Educated Youth Expeditionary Army. It fills up the gap in the scholarship on the Chinese political and military history by examining previously overlooked topics such as the evolving compulsory conscription system and the conscription of student soldiers.

Author

• Yan Xu, Spelman College