{"id":131,"date":"2006-06-03T11:39:45","date_gmt":"2006-06-03T16:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/2006\/06\/my-great-helmsman-is-charlton-heston\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:41:10","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:41:10","slug":"my-great-helmsman-is-charlton-heston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2006\/06\/my-great-helmsman-is-charlton-heston\/","title":{"rendered":"My Great Helmsman is Charlton Heston"},"content":{"rendered":"<p ><span style=\"\">In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in <\/span><span style=\"\">Guangdong<\/span><span style=\"\"> province in the 1920\u2019s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument about the role of guns in Chinese politics. The article as a whole attempts to get at the level of armament in the province, which is of course difficult to do. Weapons came in from all sorts of places, military weapons, local production, the British in <\/span><span style=\"\">Hong Kong<\/span><span style=\"\"> trying to stir up trouble. <\/span><span style=\"\">Guangdong<\/span><span style=\"\"> produced a lot of overseas sojourners (the article focuses on the <\/span><span style=\"\">Pearl River<\/span><span style=\"\"> delta) and they liked to help out the folks back home by buying them guns. Although guns flowed into the province throughout the 20s prices kept going up, (locally made rifles went from 40 yuan apiece in 1912 to 170 in 1928. Prices of handguns rose more slowly) indicating that there was still lots of demand. After some speculation on total numbers of guns the authors focus on the Guomindang Canton government\u2019s attempt to license and tax weapons. This was initially a revenue move. During the warlord period states taxed almost everything and guns were a particularly attractive thing to tax. Gradually attempts to license guns came to be more focused on denying weapons to opponents of the state, most notably the Merchant Corps of Canton, which was always difficult to control.<\/span><\/p>\n<p ><span style=\"\">            The most interesting thing about the article is the conclusion. The authors conclude that <\/span><span style=\"\">Guangdong<\/span><span style=\"\"> did not see the emergence of really serious local oppressors, (<\/span>\u571f\u7687\u5e1d<span style=\"\">)<\/span><span style=\"\"> or of large-scale banditry because as a fairly prosperous area it was a well-armed area. As a result it was hard for any one family to dominate a local militia and hard for the state to control the people. Thus local independence grows out of the barrel of a gun. <\/span><\/p>\n<p ><span style=\"\">            I\u2019m not sure I entirely buy this. I\u2019m not sure things in <\/span><span style=\"\">Guangdong<\/span><span style=\"\"> were really that good, or that this single explanation really explains it. <\/span><span style=\"\">Guangdong<\/span><span style=\"\"> does seem a good deal less disastrous than many other areas during the warlord period, but then so does the <\/span><span style=\"\">Shanghai<\/span><span style=\"\"> area, and I suspect this has more to do with the presence of a major urban area than with guns per se. What I do find interesting is the almost libertarian emphasis on guns and popular power. Chinese scholarship usually seems pretty state-centered, i.e. looking from the point of view of the state at the problem of controlling the people. (Or regarding the Nationalist state as evil and assuming the existence of a Communist counter-state) I don\u2019t have much problem with a state focus, since the process of state-building was one of the most important parts of <\/span><span style=\"\">China<\/span><span style=\"\">\u2019s 19<sup>th<\/sup> and 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, but it is nice to see civil-society type ideas being applied outside <\/span><span style=\"\">Shanghai.<\/span><span style=\"\"> <\/span><span style=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p ><span style=\"\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p ><span lang=\"ZH-CN\">\u90b1\u6377\uff0c\u4f55\u6587\u5e73<\/span><span style=\"\">\u201c<\/span><span style=\"\">1920 <\/span><span lang=\"ZH-CN\">\u5e74\u4ee3\u5e7f<\/span><span lang=\"ZH-CN\" style=\"font-family: MingLiU\">\u4e1c\u7684\u6c11\u95f4\u6b66\u5668<\/span><span style=\"\">\u201d in <\/span><span lang=\"ZH-CN\" style=\"font-family: MingLiU\">\u4e00\u4e5d\u4e8c<\/span><span style=\"\">0<\/span><span lang=\"ZH-CN\" style=\"font-family: MingLiU\">\u5e74\u4ee3\u7684\u4e2d\u56fd\uff0c\u793e\u4f1a\u79d1\u5b66\uff0c\u5317\u4eac\uff0c<\/span><span style=\"\"> 2005<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an interesting article on the gun trade and state control of weapons in Guangdong province in the 1920\u2019s Qiu Jie and He Wenping make an interesting argument about the role of guns in Chinese politics. The article as a whole attempts to get at the level of armament in the province, which is of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,106,126,61,155,159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-civil-war","category-general","category-nationalism","category-republican","category-social-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-27","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5051,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/5051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}