Privatized violence and the making of public concern: the 1922 Fuyang bandit crisis in Republican China

Abstract

The 1922 seizure of Fuyang, Anhui Province, by the “Old Foreigner” (Laoyangren) bandit clique exposed the catastrophic consequences of localized military privatization during the Beiyang era (1912–1928), a period marked by rapid shifts in provincial control and the absence of consolidated state authority. This article reconstructs the collapse of Fuyang’s system of defense, hollowed out by the predatory kinship-military structure of the Ni clan, to argue that the boundary between state protection and banditry had effectively dissolved. Building on debates over the Chinese public sphere, the study demonstrates how the administrative paralysis that followed the sacking of the city inadvertently catalyzed a transregional civic mobilization. Drawing on press reports and historical memoirs, it traces how Anhui natives in Shanghai utilized modern media not merely as a channel for public opinion but as an alternative mechanism of political contestation to check warlord impunity. The Fuyang case reveals a paradox: state fragility did not simply atomize society, but compelled temporarily disarmed revolutionary and civic elites to forge new, if ultimately constrained, networks of political accountability across regional boundaries. In doing so, they transformed the public sphere into both a humanitarian arena and a strategic instrument against warlord rule.