Some of the earliest usages of junren can be traced back to the late nineteenth century and occur in the context of military westernization/modernization (Lo 5). The term is generally seen in similar contexts throughout the Republican Era, both in the nationalist Kuomintang (GMD) and Communist Party (CCP) military milieus. In the 1950s, junren appears in the context of the PLA’s attempts to professionalize along the lines of the Soviet Union’s armed forces (Li 114), which can be also seen in many PLA Daily articles published during this time:

Junren appears also in the context of the rational management of the military and current and former military service-members; most common are texts related to the systematic incorporation of the various formal, semi-formal, and informal groups of fighters from World War Two, the Civil War, and the Korean War, into the PLA or into civilian work units, a process in which these soldiers were known as fuyuan junren (复员军人).7 Furthermore, many of the articles referencing junren from the 1950s and early 1960s deal with the dependents of servicemembers. For example, an article from January 14, 1956, focuses on the family life of military officers. While it is concerned predominantly with ensuring that the families of officers adhere to socialist family values, what is of particular importance here is the recognition of the “military officer [junguan 军官] as a long-term professional [changqi zhiye 长期职业] working in the armed forces” (“Effectively Supporting the Families of Military Officers,” PLA Daily, No. 1-14, 1956).8 Mentions of junren in articles during the 1950s generally follow this trend of increasing professionalization and rational management of the PLA.

As noted by Li, however, during the 1950s a “widening gap” emerged between “an increasingly radicalized society and a gradually regularized military” (114). While junren was primarily associated with the modernization and professionalization of the military during the 1950s, the appearance of the affectively charged zhanshi in the same period reveals the radicalization that Li refers to but also the mounting tensions within official discourse as to who can be considered the legitimate agent of state violence (Figure 1). While Shambaugh (“The Soldier and the State” 533) argued that “[p]rofessionalism and politicization are not necessarily mutually exclusive in any army, including the Chinese,” the divergence of the professional junren and the romanticized zhanshi becomes increasingly palpable during the most radical decades of the 1960s and 1970s. This radicalization was partly the result of the gradual takeover of the PLA by Mao Zedong’s allies, most prominently the ascension in 1959 of Lin Biao to Minister of Defense in place of Peng Dehuai, the latter of whom had consistently advocated for professionalization.9

Zhanshi (战士) is a much more venerable term than junren, appearing notably in the frontier poems of the Tang Dynasty, where it invoked a varied pathos of bravery, virtue, and sacrifice on behalf of the country.10 In modern times, the term begins to appear in a similar romanticized and politicized context toward the end of the nineteenth century. News reports on the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), for example, refer to soldiers fighting on behalf of the Chinese nation as zhanshi.11 The term takes on revolutionary connotations during the nationalist uprisings in the first decade of the twentieth century and after the establishment of the Republic in 1912. While both junren and zhanshi exemplified an ideal citizenry, a distinctive feature of the zhanshi was its emphasis on romanticized death in the service of the revolution and the nation.

The intertwining of romanticized death with the zhanshi, and the veneration of martyrs in general, found resonance within Mao Zedong’s eschatological Communist ideology, exemplified most prominently in his eulogy to the soldier Zhang Side 张思德 (1915-1944). Titled “Serve the People,” Mao’s celebrated speech from September 8, 1944 “marked the inception of the cult of the red martyr in the history of the CCP” (Hung 280). In the PLA Daily, the association between the Chinese zhanshi and martyrdom on behalf of the nation and revolution is clear for the period of the late 1950s through the end of the 1970s. For example, an article from April 30, 1959 quotes Mao’s eulogy and commemorates the martyr An Yemin 安业民 (1938-1958), who had sacrificed himself to save an artillery piece during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958, as “the figure of a truly sublime communist soldier [zhanshi].”12 The author is quick to add, however, that An was also a farmer’s boy with an elementary school education; he was a “normal” person and an “everyday” zhanshi, and as such could be emulated by virtually anyone. This agrees with Louise Edwards’s argument that “China’s contribution to the socialist realist theory of exemplars was to bring the exemplar directly into the present world of the consumers of the narrative… close to the people” (26). The celebration of An Yemin conveys the intention of the PLA Daily’s editors to create a tangible relationship between the zhanshi and the reader, whether that be a soldier in the PLA or a commoner.

As the distance between the martyr and the average person closed, model soldiers became only the most conspicuous and well-respected zhanshi. On the back of this highly mobile figure, the mandate for legitimate violence spread beyond members of the regular state military apparatus. For example, one article uses the term in reference to the writer Lu Xun (“Learning from Mr. Lu Xun’s Fighting Spirit,” PLA Daily, No. 10-20, 1956). Another relates the story of a mother and a sister who “not only lost their own family members in the long and arduous revolutionary struggle, but also were zhanshi in their own right,” since they served various civilian roles during the communist revolution (“Glorious Mothers,” PLA Daily, No. 11-13, 1956). PLA Daily also uses the term to refer to members of the people’s militias, as in an article which portrays the stalwart minbing zhanshi as “loyal to the motherland and loyal to the revolutionary enterprise” (“Exemplary Figures in Militia Battalions,” PLA Daily, No. 8-13, 1964).

Yet the increasingly prominent label was available not only to those coming from the ranks of the educated elite, those who had lost loved ones in military conflict, or the junren members of the PLA. Ultimately, anyone who sacrificed themselves on behalf of the nation could be described as and, perhaps most crucially, describe themselves as a zhanshi. A paean from September 10, 1958 glorifies an entire zhanshi nation:

Here, virtually everyone fighting on behalf of the Motherland is a soldier, military member or not. As the Cultural Revolution gets underway, the zhanshi’s mobility combines with the increasing concentration of command over the legitimate use of force within the person of Chairman Mao to give rise to many of the violent mass movements of the era, including that of the Red Guards (hongweibing 红卫兵), the zealous teenage adherents of Mao Zedong Thought who answered his call to violently attack class enemies allegedly still lurking among the People (Thurston, Enemies; Yang). In an article entitled “Always Following Chairman Mao to Wage Revolution” from September 2, 1966, Red Guards are quoted as stating that “[w]e must hold high the great banner of Mao Zedong Thought, study the PLA in great earnest, become Red Guard zhanshi who live up to the title bestowed by the great Commander-in-Chief Chairman Mao, and forever serve as faithful servants of the People.”13

During the period that the zhanshi was in the ascendant, from the increasing politicization of the PLA in the late 1950s to the end of the Mao era in the late 1970s, there are also articles dealing with the junren, albeit they are much less frequent. Different from the focus in the 1950s on the management of retired veterans and/or military families, or the reincorporation of veterans into new military units, the emphasis on junren in the 1960s and 1970s is on reinforcing the glorious image of veterans, their families, and, by association, the PLA and its revolutionary accomplishments of the past. This was done through mass campaigns, referred to variously as “embrace the military and privilege military dependents” (yongjun youshu 拥军优属) and “privilege and care work” (youfu gongzuo 优抚工作), among other terms (Table 1). At the same time that the PLA Daily led these mass campaigns to burnish the revolutionary image of junren, the military dependents, and the PLA in general, it viewed junren and other elements of the PLA bureaucracy as potential sources of revolutionary force in and of themselves.14 Yet even in the midst of heated revolution and attempts to mobilize the junren and its associated groups, the term appears to maintain its association with military organization and lacks strong affective connotation; in other words, during this era junren remains for the most part professional as opposed to political.

As we move to the late 1970s and 1980s, there are still a large number of articles relating the term junren to the topics commonly associated with it in previous eras, such as military dependents and veterans. The junren is also still associated with military professionalization and modernization. Noteworthy during this period, however, is the junren’s increasing politicization, as it begins to take on some of the romantic characteristics of zhanshi from the Mao era. In what is a solid confirmation of Shambaugh’s statement that professionalization and politicization are not mutually exclusive in the PLA (Shambaugh, “China’s Military”), there are a large number of articles from this period focused on the spirit and character of the junren and the role that they are to play in and for society. For example, an article from September 1980 calls on soldiers and cadres to avoid using foul language (“Be Civilized, Polite Soldiers,” PLA Daily, No. 9-1, 1980). No longer is the figure of the junren simply an individual in a military bureaucracy. Here, at the beginning of “Reform and Opening Up,” junren is also taking on a new moral function in society. This moralized figure of the junren is apparent in many other articles as well, such as one which references the ongoing military conflict between the PRC and Vietnam: “Sacrificing Oneself in the Interest of the People is a Soldier’s Most Sublime Moral Precept” (No 12-10, 1985). Quoting Sunzi’s The Art of War, the text lays out the essence of what the “soldier of the new era” (xin shiqi junren 新时期军人) is supposed to be:

And yet, despite this new ethical content of the junren in the 1980s and its thrust toward nationalized sacrifice, its affective potential still pales in comparison with the zhanshi. This is particularly striking in the articles dealing with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. When mentioning members of the PLA who fought against the demonstrators and/or who were injured or killed during the conflict, the journal commonly refers to those soldiers not as junren, a figure close at hand and imbued with the necessary politicized connotations, but as zhanshi:

Considering the dynamic landscape of violent agency from the founding of the PLA Daily in 1956 to the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4th, 1989, it becomes evident that the legitimation for this violent agency is closely tied to the shifting positionalities of the figures of the junren and the zhanshi within the PLA Daily. In this context, the journal emerges as a key player in legitimizing a spectrum of violent actors, all fervently dedicated to the cause of the People and their struggle against perceived adversaries. One can see how the PLA Daily’s legitimation of the zhanshi, with its social mobility and its more radical violent potential, stimulated the excessive civil violence of the Cultural Revolution years: anyone could take on the mantle of the People’s zhanshi and mete out fury on those people deemed enemies. It is here, in an almost total state of exception, that Agamben’s civil war between “people” and “the People” reaches its apogee. No wonder, then, that the PLA Daily attempts in the 1980s to walk back its legitimation of the zhanshi in favor of the junren as the bearer of the PRC state’s mandate for violence. With the ascent of the junren, violence on behalf of the People is safely sequestered within the ranks of the PLA, a bureaucratic military organization under the Party’s control. The zhanshi, that infinitely more volatile figure of the soldier, is thereafter kept on reserve, to be unleashed whenever the simple patriotism and professional ethic of the junren prove insufficient to spur soldiers and civilians into violent action.

Having outlined a genealogy of the two major soldier designations, junren and zhanshi, we now move on to the enigmatic figure of the People’s Militia (minbing). Here, we focus only on the militia’s accession to the status of legitimate agents of violence during the late Cultural Revolution as well as their subsequent fall from grace in the immediate post-Mao period, as seen in Figure 1; the militia’s role in the PRC’s revolutionary history calls for an independent, full-length examination.

June Dreyer’s remains one of the few scholarly treatments of the subject available to date. As she puts it, although in theory “the militia member is both civilian and soldier – a productive member of society in peacetime and a valiant warrior in time of hostilities,” in fact the militia’s role has been much more complex in China (71). Located between people and the People, the liminal status of the militia was epitomized in party slogans describing militia members as striding forward “with a shovel on one shoulder and a rifle on the other” (quoted in Dreyer 71). Despite his initial misgivings about the local militias as remnants of the Nationalist regime, Mao Zedong’s concept of the People’s War (renmin zhanzheng 人民战争), the “everyone’s a soldier” campaign (quanmin jiebing 全民皆兵), and the “three implementations” directive (san luoshi 三落实) emphasized the militia’s role in increasing domestic production and military matters (J. C. F. Wang 542). According to some estimates, approximately one-third of China’s entire population enrolled in militia organizations (McCord 125). The “sea of militiamen” was supposed to protect the country against nuclear attacks from the West (Powell; Gittings, “China’s Militia” 104–06). These developments enhanced the role of the militia, albeit not in a way that emphasized professional training, thus placing them in tension with the regular armed forces (Gittings, “China’s Militia” 107–09). Already in 1960, Ralph Powell noticed that “since the militia is an ‘organization of the masses’ rather than a professional army, the use of military ranks, uniforms, and salutes is frowned upon” (104). Similarly, Dreyer argues that “the greater the defense role given to an armed citizenry, the less the prestige of the regular army – in particular, the less the prestige of a professionally oriented, highly specialized army equipped with modern weapons” (74).

The rapid increase of the militia’s presence in the PLA Daily (Figure 1) in the 1970s speaks to the editors’ recognition of the militia’s importance, but also the militia’s own growing claims to legitimacy as agents of violence blessed by Mao Zedong’s official endorsements (da ban minbing 大办民兵), which could be traced back to his celebrated report on Hunan peasantry praising the outbursts of revolutionary violence among the rural poor as “necessary and liberating” (Walder 43). The militia’s growth posed a challenge to the PLA, however. Close reading of the minbing-related articles published between 1970 and 1976 reveals that the PLA Daily’s editors were at pains to distinguish between the militia and the regular army, as in the following Tibet-focused excerpt:

In such quasi-novelistic passages, the official zhanshi designation is clearly separated from the minbing, despite the overall emphasis placed on the collaboration between the two groups, united against a common enemy, and despite the occasional labeling of the militia as zhanshi, which we explored in the previous section.

In addition to the patronizing distinctions, which implicitly emphasized the higher status of the regular armed forces, the PLA also employed more direct means to bring the violent minbing under control. Already in November 1964, a PLA Daily editorial warned that “if political implementation is not fulfilled […] we will not be able to ensure that the guns are entirely in the hands of reliable workers and poor and middle peasants” (“Three Implementations for Enhancing Militia Work During the Socialist Education Movement,” PLA Daily, No. 11-17, 1964). Similar announcements had next to no effect in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, however. The rebel leaders in major cities declared that the local militias were ready to seize military control from the army (Walder 297). The tug of war continued for another decade (J. C. F. Wang 544–47); an editorial published jointly on September 29, 1973 in the People’s Daily and the PLA Daily called again for local party committees to reassert direct control over the armed civilians: “to properly establish the militia, the key is to get the policy right” (“Organizing the Militia Well,” PLA Daily, No. 9-29, 1973), but soon afterwards Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and other party radicals’ support for the People’s Militia regained momentum; based on various trade union federations and municipal party committees in which they were personally involved, “a command structure somewhat independent from the PLA” (J. C. F. Wang 550) was established and a change in the PRC constitution elevated the militia to parity with the PLA. Specifically, Article 15 of the PRC Constitution of 1975 reads: “The Chinese PLA and the militia [minbing] are the workers’ and peasants’ own armed forces led by the Communist Party of China.” This officially acknowledged militia was instrumental in suppressing the Tiananmen demonstrations in April 1976 sparked by the death of Premier Zhou Enlai 周恩来 (Dittmer 53; J. C. F. Wang 553).

The trajectory of the militia’s prominence in the PRC’s socio-political sphere, particularly as narrated in the PLA Daily, underscores the tension and the balance of power between grassroots mobilization and centralized authority in the Chinese Communist narrative. The frequent distinctions between the militia and the PLA in official publications reflect a cautious endorsement of the former (supported, after all, by none other but Mao Zedong), while simultaneously keeping them distinct from the regular army. The sheer fact that the militia could be considered legitimate agents of violence did not diminish but rather increased the potential for tensions between the armed civilians and the professionally trained soldiers. With the growing professionalization of the PLA’s armed forces and the ascent of the junren as the recognized agent of violence in the 1980s, Mao Zedong’s passing also marked the decline of the minbing.

The expediency of the attention shift away from the local developments towards the international stage has not been sufficiently emphasized by scholars. It has been often assumed that from its very inception the CCP was “internationalist in premise and in promise” (Kirby 874), in accordance with the Marxist-Maoist ideology and the CCP’s push for “Eastern revolution” meant to redefine the rules of international relations (Dirlik; Levenson 1–18; Volland 9–15; B. Wang, “Art”). As noted by Jian Chen (11), however, “revolutionary foreign policy helped to make Mao’s various state and societal transformation programs powerful unifying and national themes supplanting many local, regional, or factional concerns.” The idealized accounts of socialist internationalism as a “global struggle against capital” (Tyerman 7, 36) and an attempt to build “a socialist world economy stretching from Berlin to Canton” (Kirby 870) frequently overlook the pragmatic aspects of internationalist imagination. We suggest that in addition to its well-documented role in furthering domestic mobilization, internationalism served also as a rhetorical-distributional move that pushed the images of destabilizing violence towards remote lands located far from the center, not unlike the more recent Wolf Warrior 2 imagery contrasting domestic safety with overseas violence. This strategy was all the more important given that China’s armed forces were increasingly beset by factionalism in the late 1960s, the main line PLA forces and the local militia-driven PADs (People’s Armed Departments, or renmin wuzhuang bu 人民武装部) finding themselves at odds with each other (Guoqiang and Walder 5–6, 83; Dreyer 67–68).

For example, in mid-1967 an “unprincipled civil war” (Bridgham 18) engulfed the PRC and the antagonism and hostility increased between the PLA and the revolutionary left. Instead of supporting army commanders, revolutionary mass organizations in the provinces and major cities violently attacked local military control committees. On May 7, Mao launched an intensive rectification campaign within the army; clashes between rival factions disrupted several major rail lines, and the Wuhan Incident unfolded in mid-July, where the PLA-backed “Million Heroes” (bai wan xiongshi 百万雄师) and the Red Guards-backed “Wuhan Workers” (gongren zongbu 工人总部), both counting hundreds of thousands of members, engaged in an intense propaganda war and military confrontations; Red Flag editorial on July 31 fueled military sentiments, appealing to “bring down the capitalist roaders” in the PLA. Large-scale conflicts occurred in Beijing, Chongqing, Hangzhou, and other big cities (Thurston, “Urban Violence”). Such violent circumstances at home seemed of little importance to the PLA Daily’s editors, however. According to our model, some of the most violent articles published between May and July 1967 focus on events happening far from major PRC agglomerations, denouncing US imperialism and the Western incursions into PRC territory. In the following years, there are also hundreds of articles related to significant victories and developments in the military engagements in Southeast Asia and Palestine:

Such internationalist coverage was disconnected from the developments within the PRC, however, where local, unofficial outlets brimmed with uncompromising denunciations of opposing factions. Writing about the revolution in Chongqing, Guobin Yang in his Red Guard Generation notes that “factional battles were intense and deadly in many places, […] involving the use of rifles, heavy artillery, and even tanks and military battleships” (41). The rebels would seize machinery factories to produce makeshift weapons and vehicles and then deploy them against their enemies. Across the country, different military groupings engaged in public accusations of their opponents and commemorated their own dead through public memorial services and newspaper pages devoted to the martyrs (Ji 180–218). Condemning the cruelty of their enemies, Red Guards would intersperse violent accounts of battles with Mao’s quotations, vying to prove their revolutionary credentials. The violence typical of such texts, however, comes from a completely different distribution than the one that characterizes official publications such as the PLA Daily.

Thus, while propagating an anti-colonial ethos and championing global justice, the official narratives published in the PLA Daily simultaneously served an important rhetorical purpose at odds with the happenings inside the country. A computational analysis which allows for the observation of shifts in the topical distribution of violence over time makes such narrative strategies more easily identifiable when combined with traditional historiographical approaches.