Yiyun, China’s Wartime Relay Transport System
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2025
This chapter explores the impact of military grain provisioning on civilians through a study of yiyun, the Nationalists’ relay transport system. Having lost key sections of major railways and without adequate supplies of trucks or fuel, the Nationalists resorted to the large-scale use of civilian labor and equipment to transport military grain. There was no equivalent in scale in any other theater of World War II to the Nationalists’ reliance on mass local mobilization as a key mode of both military and commercial transport. Proponents of this nationwide scheme drew inspiration from the courier service of imperial times, but also applied the more recent concept of “scientific management.” As with granary networks, yiyun tied civilians directly to the prolonged conflict, extending state powers into the remotest communities through historic units of local administration, the baojia. Because both yiyun and granary networks hinged on civilian contributions of labor, property, and foodstuffs, they reveal the basis of the Nationalist war effort as the systematic imposition of sacrifice upon the citizenry.
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