Mutual Protection / 互助保障

Generalizations can only take us so far, but here’s one I’ve found useful over the past 3+ years of looking at Chinese social organization and internal security work.

In both traditional and modern Chinese society there are a number of significant social structures that are mandatory — i.e. you can’t opt out of them — and hierarchical in nature, most critically the family and the state (also class, but I won’t get into that here). Indeed these two are often conflated in official ideologies, where the patriarchal family serves as a metaphor and model for the relations between a ruler and his subjects.

However, there is another set of social structures which work differently. These take the form of voluntary organizations that are supposedly egalitarian and democratic, where members have chosen to join and decisions are reached by consensus or at least by consulting with members. These organizations take several different forms — peasant mutual aid societies (partially co-opted by the state in contemporary 互助组), agricultural cooperatives, guilds, native place associations, certain religious sects, secret societies, organized crime, political parties, intellectual study groups, nationalist or reformist groups, peasant rebellions, unions, some NGOs, certain local militias, etc. — but they all operate largely outside or parallel to traditional hierarchies, offering alternative forms of social organization.

Western scholars are especially enthralled by this “mutual protection” branch of Chinese social organization for two important reasons. First, they see these groups as an important source of resistance to the hierarchical demands of family, state, and class. If a local official is demanding excessive taxes from the peasants, a society might form to resist these demands and eventually even mobilize to further the peasants’ interests. Secondly, as voluntary, non-state organizations, Westerners like to hope that these organizations — combined into a hodge-podge of competing interests along with the family, state, and other social structures — might be that magical thing called “civil society,” something that we suspect might be important for sustainable democratic government.

For my current research interests, I find it much more interesting that this “mutual protection” branch of traditional social organization underlies the both the Nationalist and Communist parties, which for most of their early histories operated as a secret societies of mutual protection for people who might be killed at any time by Qing, Nationalist, Japanese, Communist, or puppet government forces (or purged by their own side). This is especially true, I think, within early security forces who worked alongside and borrowed ideas from criminal brotherhoods like the Green Gang and traditional Chinese scholarly societies and religious sects (along with, of course, European fascism and socialism). Sun Yatsen had a huge admiration for the Taiping founder and peasant rebel leader Hong Xiuquan. Chiang Kaishek apparently liked speaking of the Nationalist secret service as if they were heroes from popular martial arts novels, outlawed men of virtue banding together and adopting a bandit lifestyle to save the kingdom from a dire fate. The Nationalist “blue shirts” from the Society for Vigorous Practice (力行社) operated a kind of secret freemasonry built on the principles of traditional secret societies.

However, and this is what I hope to study in my first project, almost all of these traditional (and contemporary) forms of organization in the “mutual protection” model were built on the foundation of a fictional brotherhood created among male peers. The Taiping were considered somewhat revolutionary, in fact, partially because they allowed women into military and political roles, such as Hong Xiuquan’s sister Hong Xuanqiao. But in Shanghai and other areas between 1900-1950, women began taking active roles in these early security and secret service organizations, in effect making these traditional secret brotherhoods “go co-ed”, which must have created interesting social tensions for everyone involved. So I’m going to be digging into scholarly literature from and about the period looking to see how these tensions played out and what they tell us about the larger changes taking place in Chinese society as a whole.