Bugles at Dawn: The Chinese Scouting Program, Its Goals and Training

This paper examines the wartime role of the Chinese Boy Scouts (known in Chinese as "The Boy's Army", tongzi jun).  Born abroad as an international organization, it was established in China in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution, when its watchword was still “Be prepared.”  The organization was kept thriving in the 1920s and 1930s by the Chinese government itself as well as the international powers in foreign settlements.  The first Chinese Girl Scout organization was founded in 1925, ten years after the founding of the organization in the United States in 1915.  Because of a paucity of source materials, the role of the Girl Scouts will be used in this paper mainly as a foil to aspects of the Boy Scouts.  While the parameters of Boy Scout goals were clear, the roles of girls in the scouting movement were considerably more complex.

            Nearly 3,600 boy Scouts attended the First Chinese National Jamboree in Nanjiing in 1930; that attendance number climbed to 13,268 at the 1936 Second Jamboree in the capital.  The General Association of the Boy Scouts of China was formally established in Nanjing in 1934; and it joined forty-three nations around the world in 1937 to become a member of the International Scout Bureau.  Its registered Chinese membership in 1941 was 570,000.

            This paper questions the reasons for the rise of such a large paramilitary youth unit (linked as it was to organizations abroad) at the same time as the