Of Pen and Gun: Political Practice and Identity in the Nationalist Youth Army, 1944–45

This paper explores the identities of the “Intellectual Youth Volunteers” and their organization into the 10 divisions of the Youth Army in 1944-45.   Primarily students and petty intellectuals (from the interior provinces still under Nationalist control) who were increasingly precarious due to rampant inflation, these volunteers enjoyed material and symbolic rewards for their display of loyalty to the Nationalist state. 

As they left behind their civilian lives, the self-identities of these men underwent dramatic changes; they saw themselves becoming China’s ideal soldiers.  This new identity was deliberately constructed through the political culture of the barracks; the Youth Army authorities, including Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Jiang Jingguo, mobilized a suite of politicized practices (training, rituals, contests, meetings, self-criticisms, autobiographical writing) to re-write the volunteers’ identities.  None of these practices were unique to the Youth Army, but they were concentrated and intensified in the training regimen to produce a profound sense that the volunteers were a new type of man, elite citizen-soldiers that would save the Chinese nation in its most desperate hour. 

Ironically, however, this Youth Army never saw action against Japan; instead the soldiers’ mission was to generate pro-regime propaganda; the Youth Army was a publicity machine for the Nationalist state, producing autobiographical propaganda accounts for use in military and regime-sponsored publications.  It was a writing Army.   Yet, despite the hopes and care that Nationalist authorities lavished on the Youth Army, cracks appeared in the ideological mirror of the soldiers’ writings and in their behavior; the identity of the state’s most committed and disciplined citizens proved impossible to manipulate completely.