This special issue of Journal of Chinese History makes the case that military institutions are essential for understanding Chinese history. Our goal is to engage a broad audience instead of talking exclusively to specialists in military history. Thus, rather than an institutional account of, say, the imperial guard, or detailed campaign narratives, readers will find here exploration of the dynamic interplay between military institutions and political control, socioeconomic change, dynastic finances, and cultural values.

During the Tang period (618–907), war and the preparations for war significantly influenced the shape of the Chinese empire and the lives of its people. That influence can be found on at least four levels. The first of these is the state’s demand for military service, which imposed a variety of burdens upon a significant percentage of the population. The second is the state’s demand for cash, fabric, grain and other financial and material resources to meet the needs of the military establishment, a demand that affected the whole of the taxpaying population. Third is the loss and destruction caused directly by warfare, especially massive internal conflicts such as the rebellions of An Lushan and Huang Chao. Fourth, and most far-reaching and diffuse, is the range of cultural reactions to military affairs, from the emphatic embrace of martial attitudes and behaviors to their emphatic rejection.

Although the standard narrative of the Song dynasty is one of civil dominance over the military within the government and society, the institutional development of the government bureaucracy argues for a more nuanced description. The martial side of the government achieved parity in size with the civil side during the Song, exclusive of the army and its bureaucracy. Literati with civil exam degrees filled most of the upper ranks of this martial bureaucracy and therefore occupied themselves with martial, rather than civil, concerns on a day to day basis. A significant number of important civil literati spent most of their time on military tasks and military policy. Functionally then, in contrast to their ideology, many civil literati were militarized by their roles in the bureaucracy while they were controlling it.

Systemic attention to military institutions sharpens our understanding of the Ming dynasty in comparative, global terms and yields a fuller perspective on the state and its role in people’s lives. First, the Ming dynasty devoted more resources, in absolute terms, to its military enterprise than any other contemporary power. It maintained enormous standing armies that drilled regularly, empire-wide logistical systems, welfare provisions for military dependents and retired or injured military personnel, and multi-tiered, standardized arms productions under state supervision. Western European states were just starting to achieve such capacity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Second, focused on civil administration, such as taxes, labor service, magistrates, land surveys, tithing communities, and mutual responsibility organizations, past scholarship has largely ignored how the state’s extensive military institutions both shaped society and served as resources that people used to advance their personal, family, and community interests.

This article underscores the impact of the Qing dynasty’s war making capacity and organization on non-military areas. Following a brief account of the Qing military establishment and its major operations in the first half of the dynasty, i.e., 1640–1800, it explores several important examples of how Qing military institutions interacted with the civil bureaucracy and society at large. First, through the practice of appointing officials across the divide between the civil and military bureaucracies, military personnel penetrated into the domain of the civil state apparatus, quietly transforming the Qing government’s makeup. Second, Qing military costs deeply influenced the distribution of dynastic financial resources and general administration at all levels. Finally, the Qing’s wartime logistical system engaged both the civil bureaucracy and society, opening many opportunities for both civil bureaucracy personnel and the private sector, which in turn re-shaped the local socio-economic landscape.

The study of ethnicity has long been shaped by a conflict between two broad positions, one of which may be called the circumstantialist or instrumentalist position, and the other the primordialist or affectivist position. The primordialists view ethnic sentiments as something existing prior to and not dependent on goal-oriented behavior and hence not subject to calculation. The circumstantialists, however, view ethnicity as a product of particular circumstances in which contingent groups, usually at the behest of elites within those groups, broaden and reconceptualize their particular group interests as being derived from a common primordial substance, thus generating ethnicity. These circumstantialist or instrumentalist arguments as a rule assume that the particular circumstances where such group redefinitions and extensions prove useful are either unique to, or at least much more common in, the modern age. Thus the circumstantialist approach usually implies a modernist one.

People routinely refer to the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong as two subjects that are “sensitive” to write and even talk about in today's People's Republic of China (PRC). This is true, but not all “sensitive” events and individuals are created equal—or handled the same way by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When it comes to the June 4th Massacre, another “sensitive” event, and Liu Xiaobo, another “sensitive” figure, all public and even some relatively private forms of discussion are blocked. The goal is to make them both forgotten, as Louisa Lim argues in her important, aptly titled 2014 Oxford book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. The CCP's aim with the Cultural Revolution and Mao, by contrast, is not to blot out but control memory, not stop but steer the direction and constrain the scope of research, discussion, and commemoration. Last year, when the fiftieth anniversary of the first Red Guard rallies passed, there was, tellingly, muted discussion in all parts of the PRC other than Hong Kong but, equally tellingly, not a complete June 4th anniversary style blackout. Mainland bookstores stock novels dealing with the Cultural Revolution but not June 4th, and texts by and biographies of Mao but not Liu. And so on.