Carrying the “Nation’s Thousand-Jin Burden”: Yiyun, the Relay Transportation System during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Nationalist government established a system of relay transportation, called yiyun, to move military provisions and consumption goods across Free China. The Nationalists’ dependence on locally sourced porters, pack animals, and boats was a product of their unique challenge: waging protracted war within an agrarian economy. While yiyun had its own bureaucratic apparatus at the national level, its day-to-day operations throughout the provinces fell onto local actors, such as the baojia. Through these local agents of control and extraction, the Nationalist state channeled the exigencies of war into the remotest communities and the individual household. The yiyun system demonstrates the wartime Nationalists’ remarkable capacity for organizing resources in a time of crisis. However, its exploitative tendencies also reveal their willingness to trade civilian livelihoods for better odds of survival. Any recognition of the Nationalists’ success in maintaining China’s sovereignty must also accept its foundation in imposed civilian sacrifice.