How Internal Elite Conflicts Affect Counterinsurgency Warfare: Evidence from the First Chinese Civil War (1927–1936)

Abstract

What explains sub-national variation in counterinsurgency strategies? During civil war, state military forces often employ a mix of strategies to defeat rebel groups. Yet, existing studies mainly focus on the effectiveness of certain strategy combinations and overlook the role of intra-elite conflicts in shaping counterinsurgency military decisions. Building on prior scholarship, this article argues that counterinsurgents in authoritarian regimes strategically deploy troops in ways that balance threats from both elites and the civilian populace. Specifically, they (1) send troops connected with rival elites to less critical but more hazardous battlefields while (2) deploy loyal forces to more critical war zones. I test the argument using the example of the First Chinese Civil War (1927–1936), drawing on an original dataset on state military deployment collected from archives. The findings support expectations: troops connected with rival regime elites were deployed to counterinsurgency battlefields earlier but were less likely to engage in major encirclement campaigns. Overall, this work illustrates that counterinsurgency military deployments are shaped not only by military effi- ciency considerations but also by political considerations related to intra-elite con- flicts within an authoritarian ruling coalition.