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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2011
This 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 a tuntian system 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 the tuntian system 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.
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