The concept manifested itself most concretely during China’s war against Japan and the subsequent Civil War, when the exigencies of chronic violent conflict forced the Nationalist government to mobilize civilian populations for an array of military tasks. The Ministry of Military Administration set up “civil-military cooperation stations” for army units to draw on local resources to meet their everyday needs, and to pool resources to reinvigorate local production. More importantly, these stations were vehicles of political work. They served to rectify the longstanding public perception that “good men don’t become soldiers” by embedding military units within the local community. The practice also emerged in Taiwan in “pacification zones,” as the effects of the Civil War rippled across the straits to influence Nationalist administration on the newly recovered island.
This paper examines Nationalist civil-military cooperation programs in both mainland China and Taiwan throughout the 1940s and 1950s to probe broader questions. It attempts to trace the conceptual foundations of civil-military cooperation to the Nationalist Party’s armed struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. As their engagements with their rivals during this time frequently turned violent, the Nationalists sought to rewrite public impressions of the soldier and of the legitimacy of armed force in politics. By latching on to civil-military cooperation as a political trope, they reified the soldier and army as models for patriotic, disciplined living, irrevocably blurring the distinction between civil and military spheres.