From the 1920s to the 1950s, the movement of Shenbing, also called the Sacred Army, had spread across the Xiang’E Xi, Sichuan, and Guizhou regions in Southwest China, coalescing into a nexus of religious, military, and social power with its self-proclaimed political legitimacy under the aegis of local Buddhist and Daoist followers. Emerging as a subversive response to the Republican reforms in rural China, it has a long-lasting impact on local governance and the development of revolutions in these three decades. Drawing on David Robinson’s idea of the economy of violence, Prasenjit Duara’s theory of the cultural nexus of power, as well as Philip Kuhn and Joseph Escherick’s work on state interaction with the alternative forms of local control, this study will bring to bear the implications of the Shenbing phenomenon onto the concurrent process of the communist revolution, demonstrating that the understanding the Communist Revolution’s success has to be interpreted in the plural form — “successes'' achieved in the different regional dynamics closely tied to each locale.
By examining the historical context, visual representations, and witness accounts of Shenbing from newspapers, government documents, interviews, and personal writings, I argue that the Shenbing movement had its historical roots in secret societies and fraternal sodalities formed in the Ming-Qing transition that feature lower class, anti-foreign and anti-establishment sentiment. On the other hand, the movement derived from a tradition of local regulatory religious orders that have had an antagonistic relationship with the state since the Song dynasty, signaling the continuity of rural political movements. The movement represented a unique yet recurring political gesture by the ordinary people to claim political agency by attaching to religious belief to organize self-assertive cultural campaigns and rejecting an official authority that demanded social and legal reforms that were disconnected from the local cultural and economic conditions.
