Talk:1911 Revolution

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The "Warlord" myth

I removed a random, unsourced statement that references "warlords plaguing China" which is something that's occasionally plastered into high school textbooks but really isn't accepted in mainstream historiography anyomre.

On the ideological origins of the warlord myth:

Waldron, A. 1991. The warlord: Twentieth-century Chinese understandings of violence, militarism, and imperialism. *The American Historical Review*, 1073-1100.

Goetze, C. 2016. Warlords and states: A contemporary myth of the international system. Myth and Narrative in International Politics: Interpretive Approaches to the Study of IR, 129-146.

Economic history of prewar China that contradicts the warlord myth:

Rawski, T. 1989. Economic Growth in Prewar China. Berkeley: University of California Press. (particularly pp. 38-40)

Political history of prewar China that contradicts the warlord myth:

Dikötter, F. 2008. The age of openness: China before Mao. Berkeley: University of California Press.

This stuff isn't really contentious anymore. If I have to get edit warred by an amateur every time I remove some random bad-history material, progress will be slow. Ceconhistorian (talk) 04:41, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

While I take a look at these, do you mind offering some specific quotations asserting that the idea of the Warlord Era as such amounts to Republican propaganda and is not based in reality? From what I have read, this is an established, legitimate, but minority position in contemporary scholarship. And yes, you have to reach consensus and justify your edits to Wikipedia regardless of what formal qualifications you have.Remsense ‥ 论 04:44, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

As a centering point, I've always understood Spence to be the center-cut consensus on much of its contents, would you dispute this or has this changed in recent years? Remsense ‥ 论 05:05, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Also, would you find it better to move this discussion to Talk:Warlord Era, as the page that would certainly stand to be the most directly improved by an improved representation of the sources here? Remsense ‥ 论 05:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

It's not a minority position, it's by now a consensus in Sinology and among political scientists focusing on China that the "warlords" concept was ideologically charged and *very* poorly suited to understanding the situation in northern China circa 1910s-1920s. The active scholars that still reference "warlordism", for lack of a better phrase, almost always use it with quote marks.

You're probably not going to get a quote that rejects "warlordism" in its entirety like I casually did in my edit summary, because academics phrase themselves more carefully about what they can or cannot reject within the scope of their study. It's a piecemeal process. But we've had half a century of more and more rigorous studdies chipping away at the warlord myth.

Thomas Rawski is, for instance, pretty much *the* authority on Republican China economic history. Rawski 1989 p.48 rejects the conventional economic narrative about "warlordism": "Existing studies often overstate the economic significance of military activities by failing to recognize the modest resources available to military commanders. Tight budgets restricted manpower, weaponry, and mobility. The resulting shortages in turn constrained the scope, duration, and geographic extent of warfare and its attendant disruptions. The secondary literature also exaggerates the economic cost of military regimes by overlooking their limited power, overemphasizing their negative features, and neglecting their progressive dimensions. China's military sometimes lived up to its reputation as a drain on the economy, especially because of its effects on business uncertainty, but these negative effects were felt for the most part in regions plagued with shifting military administrations and in actual war zones."

Waldron 1991 traces the "warlord" concept directly to 1920s rhetoric and propaganda. (p.1073) "Apparently never used in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, it gained currency in the early 1920s and had come to dominate political discussion by the end of the decade." (p.1080) "The first Chinese to use the new word was probably Chen Duxiu...In July 1922, the Second Congress of the Chinese Communist party explained the new concept" "The term junfa also began to be used by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925). For much of his career, Sun had based his hopes for power not only on his political program but also on military maneuvers, for example, in his intrigues with the American would-be military hero Homer Lea and his attempts to ally with various leading militarists. But, by late 1924, Sun and his Guomindang party were changing their approach. Their propaganda increasingly stressed anti-militarism and anti-imperialism".

Dikötter introduces his entire 2008 book as such (p.3): "This book uses a variety of primary sources and a highly informative body of secondary literature to challenge the view that modern China was mainly defined by 'warlords', 'imperialism' or 'disintegration': it suggests instead that in many respects it might very well be qualified as a golden age of engagement with the world. People, things and ideas moved in and out of the republican era, as global flows fostered an unprecedented degree of diversity which has yet to be appreciated in standard history textbooks: globalisation, rather than revolution, appears - with the benefit of hindsight - to have been the driving force of the half-century before the Cold War."

Here's another dedicated study of "warlords" that I forgot to mention, probably one of the first in the West to challenge the warlord myth and so deserves some credit: Gillin, D. 1967. Warlord: Yen Hsi-Shan in Shansi Province, 1911-1949. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. (p.296) "the ‘warlord period’ of China’s history was not merely an era of fruitless strife but rather a period of transition which witnessed changes so significant that without them the unification and modernization of China currently being undertaken would be impossible."

Spence was a specialist of Qing China who finished his PhD in the 1960s. His textbook summary of the Republican period (I assume you mean the 2-3 chapters in The Search) has very little academic relevance.

And look - if I'm getting edit-warred over removing a single unsourced statement that doesn't even fit into the paragraph and should have been removed regardless, I'm not venturing into that whole mess of another article that you're also demonstrating WP:OWNBEHAVIOR over. This is not going to be an effective discussion. Ceconhistorian (talk) 05:25, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the survey. Because I'm a non-expert, I hope you can understand my initial hesitation as concerns the prospect of shifting essentially the entire historiographical framing of a period like this, and I take it very seriously because of how much better these articles deserve to be, with a shift or not.

In addition, I'm also taking a look at recent high-level secondary and tertiary sources to better orient myself. James Carter in Wasserstrom ed. Oxford History of Modern China (2021; 1st ed. 2016) takes a decidedly traditional tone in its treatment of the period, not quoting "warlord" etc. This is also the case in Fenby's Penguin History of Modern China (2019; 1st ed. 2008). Obviously it's not a good idea to solely rely on these—Fenby's not even specifically a China scholar—but they're often useful for determining what weight to assign to different positions in the scholarship per WP:TERTIARY.

Pinging some folks who likely know more than me and might have input here: @JArthur1984 @SilverStar54 Remsense ‥ 论 05:49, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

You're obviously right about the sentence regardless, so I've removed it and apologize if we've started this discussion on the wrong foot; I really hope you consider continuing to engage here. Remsense ‥ 论 05:58, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Let's focus on the scholarly literature by historians in the last decade. Historians recently have published a lot on the "warlord era" and use that term-- A Google Scholar search since 2014 gives over 900 different books, articles, dissertations and reviews with key words "warlord era" and "China." For example, history professor Edward A. McCord argues in 2022 that, "warlordism developed within a social context and had a major impact on Chinese society, and this in turn suggests the usefulness of applying a social history approach to the study of the warlord period." (in E.A. McCord, "Toward a Social History of Modern Chinese Warlordism" Journal of Chinese Military History (2022). 11#1, pp34-55. https://doi.org/10.1163/22127453-bja10010 ) Rjensen (talk) 06:05, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

The relevant treatments in Twentieth-Century China (2022). 47#1 doi:10.1353/tcc.2022.0009 also discuss warlordism directly as such, even if as a restrictive label that holds negative connotations and contributes to flattening the complexity of this important period in Chinese history. Remsense ‥ 论 06:25, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Do you have a way of measuring what fraction of those 900 works mention the concept "warlord" or "warlord era" just to dispute its validity?

Take the previously-mentioned Wasserstrom volume for instance. In (p.132), its first reference to "warlords", the term is marked in quotes. "Thus began the “warlord era”". It then goes on to spell out how un-descriptive this term is. (pp. 151-152) "The warlords who dominated this era were a colorful and diverse group. Some were brutal petty dictators, little more than gang leaders on a grand scale. Others were progressive social reformers, bureaucrats, and would-be emperors." (p.154) "There was no such thing as a “typical” warlord. The group was varied and, in many ways, defined by their diversity."

That was also the approach taken by Spence 1990 -- he mentions "warlordism", "warlord era" and "warlords" in quotation marks for all of their first mentions, and stresses that it's not a useful descriptor. (pp.288-289) "The men known as "warlords," who now controlled much of China, had a wide range of backgrounds and maintained their power in different ways. [...] In character as well, the warlords differed greatly." He does away with the quotation marks in subsequent mentions.

I'm not sure why some generalists continue to use the term (inertia? convenience?) despite accepting that it has little descriptive meaning, but it's clear that they've taken the literature's skepticisim of the term at heart, and would not agree that "Yan Xishan became a warlord who plagued China" is an apt historical description. Ceconhistorian (talk) 06:45, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

It's clear that the term should be used with considerable care and disclaimer in any case, as would adequately reflect every source we've looked at so far. In my mind, the question is whether we use it in own voice at all. Remsense ‥ 论 06:50, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

I can’t quite tell the scope of the current disagreement but will try to be on point. “Warlord era” and similar constructs to frame the time period and state of political fragmentation continue to be sound from our perspective as it is the overwhelmingly common framing in sources. I do prefer to avoid things like “Warlords plaguing” China, but this is out of a desire to be less metaphorical in all contexts here as opposed to a disagreement with “Warlord era” or similar.

On a tangent, the forthcoming “Women and Their Warlords” (by Merkel-Hess) promises an interesting analysis of the political activity of female political elites during this period. JArthur1984 (talk) 12:46, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Also, because it came up in the list of sources, I can never recommend Dikötter as a source. Either too sloppy to understand and convey what his sources write or chooses to misconstrue it to advance his preconceived themes. I think specifically of his writing on land reform when I write this. JArthur1984 (talk) 12:53, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Having now read the talk page more clearly and understood the page history more clearly:

1. I agree with the specific deletion of the unsourced and also too metaphorical sentence.
2. I don't take the first editor to mean that we should more generally re-assess "Warlord era", but rather avoid metaphor and tropes in this area.
3. As elsewhere in history, a Chinese historical "thing" is not really just one "thing" but many existing at once and in too much popular writing on history there is overemphasis on just the "one thing". It is quite right that there was a large degree of political experimentation though short-lived during the Warlord era. A readable recent source on this is also Laikwan's "One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty".

Good and interesting discussion. JArthur1984 (talk) 16:51, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Zhang Binglin quote

Two related questions here. The final sentence of Organization/Views currently reads "Others, such as Zhang Binglin, spread calls to "slay the Manchus" (興漢滅胡)^{[citation needed]} and the concept of "Anti-Manchuism" (排滿主義)." I already made a minor edit to fix the tone and associate the two zh quotations with their English counterparts.

First: I was going to add a pinyin trascription and literal translation to the two zh template quotations, but since I don't speak Chinese and am relying on Wiktionary entries for the individual characters I wanted to run it by others first. Would it be correct to put Chinese: 興漢滅胡; pinyin: xīng Hàn miè Hú; lit. 'Elevate the Han', 'obliterate the Hu' and Chinese: 排滿主義; pinyin: páimǎn zhǔyì? Though I notice that none of the other Chinese text in this article includes a Pinyin transcription; is that a deliberate style choice that needs to be followed?

Secondly, the 興漢滅胡 four-character expression does not exactly match the English quote. I assumed at first that it was only quoting the latter two characters, but the Crossley source quotes Zhang as writing "Slay the Manchus! Slay the Manchus!", which seems to be a separate quotation altogether. Crossley does not give that 4-character slogan at all, either in Hanzi or Pinyin; I have accordingly tagged it as CN, since I didn't want to remove it outright without giving someone a chance to source it or clarify its relationship to the English quote. Nicknimh (talk) 14:58, 26 November 2024 (UTC)