“Schools of Violence” tells anew the story of “how China became modern” through the lens of military academies, a Western-style educational model adopted by the imperial state in the late nineteenth century that fundamentally transformed state-organized violence in China throughout the next century and to today. From the first military academy founded by the Qing dynasty in 1885 with German instructors, this novel institution then proliferated across the entire Empire and, even after the 1911 Revolution that ended dynastic rule, each successive contender for China’s future—from Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong and others—reproduced and reinvented their own military academies as central components in their respective national projects. Despite its central importance in creating the China we see today, military academies remain understudied, making this dissertation one of the first in-depth studies on the subject in English.

This dissertation places the advent of the modern military academy in China within two interrelated vectors of change. The first is technological change. Whereas scholarship has long recognized the great disparity in military technology that confronted nineteenth century imperial China vis-à-vis the West, particularly in naval development, this dissertation highlights the unrecognized importance of a different technological invention: the breech-loading rifle. Supplanting muzzle-loading muskets, these new rifles exponentially increased the lethality of individual soldiers and had key battlefield ramifications: it replaced the tactical logic previously based on mass with dispersed unit formations, decentralized command structures, and gave lower-level, junior officers unprecedented independence and responsibility. The second vector is educational change: for the new-found importance of junior officers required the Chinese state to break from its existing system of military examinations, which merely tested officers in physical skills, and to offer its agents of violence comprehensive, resident education for the first time in history. But the new military academy structure did not merely impart technical skills. In one of the most exciting findings of this dissertation, I show that the first military academy adopted Confucian classical education, taken directly from the civil service examination curriculum, repurposing it to cultivate individual agency in the junior officers that had become critical on the modern battlefield. This novel incorporation of the Confucian classics also gave the military unprecedented moral and social legitimacy as a field of learning. Whereas the story of modern China is told largely as a rejection of Confucian tradition, I show how these classical texts took on renewed importance for modern war.

Using archival materials and newly discovered and underutilized sources to reconstruct Chinese military academy classrooms, as well as the battlefields where education was put into practice, I show how Confucian tradition, far from being universally discarded by the modernizing imperatives of industrialized warfare, directly engendered the key role ideology came to play in organizing state-directed violence for both China’s Nationalist (KMT) and Communist (CCP) Parties that inherited and expanded the institution in their fight for China’s future.