This chapter tacks the origin of Qiu Jun’s categories for diagnosing disorder and examining how it arose. His categories can be grouped into six ideological modules: ethicism, especially patriarchal ethics, which Confucians know as propriety and duty; Confucian Legalism, which embraces law, regulation, and punishment; moralism, which is enshrined in the category of personal virtue; rationalism, which entails both primordial principles, general trends, and fluctuating circumstances; ethnocentrism, which highlights the socio-political superiority of Chinese to non-Chinese; and finally institutionalism, which includes rites, political institutions, and social customs, a category which could be said to characterize his entire work. All these six modules were already in the statecraft toolkit by the fourteenth century for Qiu to construct a program to respond to disorder and as well to constitute discourses for that response. In this sense, Neo-Confucian learning is more than a moral philosophy focused on self-cultivation.

This chapter explores the impact of military grain provisioning on civilians through a study of yiyun, the Nationalists’ relay transport system. Having lost key sections of major railways and without adequate supplies of trucks or fuel, the Nationalists resorted to the large-scale use of civilian labor and equipment to transport military grain. There was no equivalent in scale in any other theater of World War II to the Nationalists’ reliance on mass local mobilization as a key mode of both military and commercial transport. Proponents of this nationwide scheme drew inspiration from the courier service of imperial times, but also applied the more recent concept of “scientific management.” As with granary networks, yiyun tied civilians directly to the prolonged conflict, extending state powers into the remotest communities through historic units of local administration, the baojia. Because both yiyun and granary networks hinged on civilian contributions of labor, property, and foodstuffs, they reveal the basis of the Nationalist war effort as the systematic imposition of sacrifice upon the citizenry.

China today is one of the most governmentalized societies in the world. State penetration into everyday life may not be as thorough as some critics insist, yet the idea that the state should be present in society persuades most Chinese to submit to state oversight in exchange for the security the state claims to provide. China is not alone in elevating the state above the citizen, but it does draw on a long tradition of state policy and political philosophy known as "Confucian statecraft" to support this orientation, for which Qiu Jun’s Supplement provides an almost complete account. This was the China that the Jesuits encountered in the seventeenth century and communicated back to Europeans at a time when the divine right of kings was in question. Qiu Jun’s method of handling monarchy was to caution the emperor on bad policy and warn him of the catastrophic effects that bad decisions could produce, and that the emperor’s main tasks were to detect latent signs of coming disasters and consult his advisors.

This chapter examines Qiu Jun’s eclectic vision of employing military violence in the rule of the imperial realm. As a well-established Classicist, Qiu deeply immersed himself in the ancient doctrines of guiding the monarch to practice the kingly way that equipped him with benevolence and righteousness, which would translate moral power into invincible military might. Moral value thus outweighed the martial one. The reality, however, taught Qiu the necessity of military preparation and using coercive means when dealing with external and internal security issues. Qiu therefore sought a way to reconcile both moral and military values. Moral principles, according to Qiu, would also legitimatize the use of military violence. Furthermore, to strengthen the military capability of the Ming Empire, Qiu also looked for intellectual resources from historical precedents to model the institutional reforms that he advocated, regardlessof the fact that the ancient practices might not fit the current circumstances.

Since the mid-fifteenth century, the enrolment of the Ming Imperial Academy had kept increasing and the Confucian students eligible for official appointments had far outnumbered the vacancies with the bureaucracy. Despite oppositions to the seniority system in making official appointments in Chinese history from the fourth century onwards as Qiu Jun adduces texts to show, he proposed that it was crucial for the Ming emperor to adopt such a system for the fairness of selection on the grounds that the problem of too many candidates for too few offices needed to be resolved and that historical circumstances required changes in institutions rather than a strict adherence to received historical wisdom.

This chapter examines the military and economic centrality of granary networks to the Nationalists’ war effort. The centralization of land tax and its collection in kind restored the granary’s historic importance as the storehouse of state wealth. However, the chapter moves away from the dominant portrayal of granaries as economic stabilizers and disaster relief mechanisms to emphasize their strategic significance for an agrarian state at war. In examining the government’s establishment of a national grain reserve scheme and its construction of granary networks throughout its territories, the chapter presents the granary as an integral part of wartime economic policy and military logistical organization. It also studies the amassing of grain reserves in southwestern Yunnan for the Chinese Expeditionary Force after the fall of Burma, a significant but forgotten effort. Unlike most studies, it pays close attention to day-to-day operations, such as checking the quality of delivered grain and preventing spoilage. These everyday procedures are a window into how the demands of war concretely shaped civilian life and illustrate that granaries were key sites of state-society interaction.

The chapter examines the Yangzi as the only inland river system that played a consistent major role in strategy during World War II. It was only in China, where protracted war was waged without a nationwide network of railways, that riverine operations emerged as the pivot of military decision-making. As China’s principal waterway, the Yangtze was not only key to the projection of military power into the hinterland, but also – and more importantly – a vital channel for transporting grain to both Chinese and Japanese armies as they endured prolonged conflict. The chapter begins at the Japanese-occupied Yangzi Delta, demonstrating how the delta became central to the China Expeditionary Army’s efforts to live off the land. It then moves upriver to highlight the understudied Battle of Yichang of mid-1940 as a turning point in the war because of its repercussions for provisioning. The Nationalist loss of Yichang severed their Sichuan base from the traditional grain-producing regions of central and east China and forced a rewriting of military provisioning policies.

This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.