Duan examines the CCP’s intensive mobilization of local militia both to engage in combat and to organize resources from local populations in the provinces of Shanxi and Henan. He challenges the tendency to dismiss militias as peripheral actors in Chinese regime-building, arguing instead that local armed forces formed the backbone of the CCP’s military capacities until its victory in 1949. Yip identifies a similar attempt within the Nationalist Party to meld military bodies with civilian communities. First in mainland China, and then in Taiwan, the Nationalist government set up “civil-military cooperation stations” to systematically extract civilian resources for military purposes. By imposing the assimilation of armed units into civilian communities, the Nationalists sought to recenter local economic agendas around military needs, but also to mold public perceptions of armed force as a legitimate political means. At different times, and for complex reasons, both endeavors yielded mixed results.

Mobilizing for war and revolution fundamentally reshaped individual and social identities, with drastic consequences for private lives. Meyskens focuses on the idealization of militarized masculinity as a means to shape behavior among men in revolutionary base areas. By exploring how these starkly gendered pressures affected male self-perception and family life for men, Meyskens highlights masculinity as a neglected analytical category in histories of revolutionary China. Tillman addresses the militarization of another component of the nuclear family: children. Even as political discourse in Republican China romanticized childhood purity and happiness, the exigencies of long-term conflict forced children into the army and factory. Tillman probes this paradoxical conception of children as both innocent victims and war participants, drawing similarities between China and other world war belligerents.

Taken together, these papers trace the exact processes through which armed conflict became both a key mode of political engagement and a fact of everyday life. They reveal how political entities drew different segments of society into their rivalries, irrevocably militarizing the lives of millions in the process. By each addressing a pertinent historiographical concern, the papers also collectively show how foregrounding military mobilization enables scholars of twentieth-century China to excavate deeply embedded social realities.