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Abstract
The social impact of modern Chinese warlordism on China's modern development has attracted little attention in past scholarship, which generally has been more interested in warlordism as a military-political system. This article argues, however, 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. This article makes a preliminary effort to advance this goal by identifying three main areas that could provide a framework for research on the social history of Chinese warlordism. First, the article examines debates over the social (or class) foundations of warlord power. Second, the article explores the ways in which warlordism changed the social status of military men and created opportunities for social mobility. Finally, the article emphasizes the need to look beyond the political impact of Chinese warlordism to show the social and economic effects that arose from the military conflicts of the warlord era.

Abstract
This article uses a case study of Hunan province to examine the role of militia in the struggle for the control of local society during the 1926-1927 National Revolution. Although the Nationalist and Communist Parties both agreed on the need eliminate militia leadership by "local bullies and evil gentry," differences quickly arose over how to reconstruct militia following this action. Nationalist Party activists tended to favor a "statist" approach that would replace abusive militia leaders with "upright" local elites but place them under stricter and more direct official control. Communist Party activists in contrast sought a "popular" mass militia free of elite influence and controlled by new peasant and worker unions. As such, this struggle over militia command and control became a key component in the broader political competition between the two parties and their alternative revolutionary visions.

Abstract
This study of Hunan province during China's Nanjing decade (1927-1937) shows how militia training could play a key role in the extension of state control both over local militia and through militia into local society. Provincial authorities in Hunan used an argument for the need to increase the efficacy of militia through more rigorous military training to justify an activist intervention in local militia organizations. This training goal then provided a means of extending increased state control over militia as provincial personnel were dispatched to "supervise" local militia training, as local militia leaders were evaluated on the basis of their ability to provide this training, and as training content was expanded to include political indoctrination as well as military skills. Meanwhile the government strengthened ties with local militia officers through extended training programs in the provincial capital or in army units. While many of these efforts focused on standing militia forces and their officers, training programs were also instituted for the mass membership of lower-level "volunteer corps." More than just political indoctrination, the regimentation instilled by regular training programs also worked to increase the state's control over the lives of its citizens.

AbstractThis paper examines how an ethnic Miao uprising in West Hunan in 1937 became the site for the interaction of a broad range of competing local, provincial, and national interests. The target of the uprising was atuntiansystem formed from confiscated Miao lands in the early nineteenth century to support a military system defending against Miao disturbances. Surviving anachronistically into the twentieth century, the military land rents of this system formed a base for warlord power on Hunan's western frontier. The uprising arose opportunistically in the context of a struggle over the resources of this system between the warlord of West Hunan and a provincial governor whose provincial state-building project sought to end the region's long political autonomy. The uprising consequently drew the attention of Nationalist Party factions who saw it as an opportunity to use the uprising to undermine the provincial governor in the interest of their own centralizing state-building project. Finally, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War allowed uprising leaders to recast the uprising as a patriotic movement, seeking equality for the Miao of West Hunan by the abolition of thetuntiansystem and offering the mobilization of uprising forces for service at the front once this goal was achieved. In the end, the uprising functioned as a palimpsest upon which the multiple motivations and desires of its participants, in their broad social, political and personal contexts, were written and overwritten.