page_title: Yellow Sand Society
section_title: Republican China
hierarchical_section_title: Yellow Sand Society / History / Republican China
caption_attribution_description: English: Selection of the September 1st 1937 ASAHIGRAPH magazine.　The image depicts a group of Imperial Army soldiers working at the forefront of the battle to establish communications. 日本語: アサヒグラフ昭和２１年９月１日より。戦闘の最前線で働く通信班の皇軍兵。
context_page_description: The Yellow Sand Society, also known as Yellow Way Society, and Yellow Gate Society, was a rural secret society and folk religious sect in northern China during the 19th and 20th century.
  Inspired by millenarian ideas, the movement launched several uprisings against the late Qing Empire, the Republic of China, and the Chinese puppet states of Japan. The Yellow Sands were eventually suppressed by the Communist Party of China in the second half of the 20th century.
context_section_description: Following the collapse of the Qing Empire, the Yellow Way Society opposed the new Republican government. This was unusual, for most secret societies chose to cooperate with the new regime until the mid-1920s. Around 1919, a man calling himself "Chu the Ninth" appeared in Anyang County of northern Henan. Claiming to be the ninth-generation descendant of the Ming dynasty, he proclaimed himself Emperor of China with the era name "Great Brightness" (Daming). In doing so, Chu was supported by a local Yellow Way teacher. The two jointly declared that China had to be reunified under the "true dragon [rightful emperor]" and that only Yellow Way Society members would be spared in the coming armageddon; their insurgency against the government lasted three years and was finally suppressed by Republican militia and army forces. Thereafter the movement resumed to call itself the Yellow Sand Society and continued to organize rural communities to resist increasing taxation and government intrusion for the rest of the Warlord Era.
  In course of the Kuomintang (KMT)'s Northern Expedition 1926–28, the power of the warlords in northern China weakened significantly. This prompted the Yellow Sands, alongside other rural groups like the Red Spears and Heavenly Gates, to seize large areas for themselves. For example, these three secret societies captured Cheng'an County in 1927 and proceeded to run the local government for several months. Although the secret societies were thus fighting the same enemies as the KMT, the latter regarded this development unfavorably. This was due to the KMT-led Nationalist government fearing that the Yellow Sands and other rural groups would hinder their own tax collections just as they had resisted the warlords' taxation.
  The Yellow Sand Society also took part in the Chinese resistance against the Empire of Japan, which increasingly occupied Chinese territory in the 1930s. One branch of the movement was reorganized by its leader Chang Yin-tang into the "People's Anti-Japanese National Salvation Self-Defence Corps", based at Taocheng in southern Hebei. Another Yellow Sand faction launched an uprising against the East Hebei Autonomous Council, a puppet state of Japan, in July 1936. Led by an old Taoist priest, the Yellow Sands managed to defeat an East Hopei Army unit that was sent to suppress them in Miyun District, whereupon the Imperial Japanese Army mobilized to crush the uprising. By September, the Yellow Sand forces in Miyun had been defeated by the Japanese, with about 300 rebels killed or wounded in battle.
  As peasant organization, the Yellow Sand Society was among the secret societies that also attracted the Communist Party of China (CPC)'s attention. In December 1942, CPC leader Li Ta-chang released a paper which detailed how Communist cadres should deal with rural secret societies, grouping them into three categories. The Yellow Sands were considered to be a "feudal organization" led by landlords, but also important potential allies in the war against the Japanese. Li argued that Communists should join the secret societies and covertly indoctrinate them, and only attack those groups that adamantly refused to adopt Communism. Over time, however, the Communists became increasingly frustrated with the secret societies' political conservatism and refusal to adopt Communist ideas, so that the CPC increasingly shifted from cooperating with the rural groups to undermining and dismantling them.
caption: The 1936 rebellion of Yellow Sands in Miyun District was crushed by the Imperial Japanese Army (pictured: Japanese soldiers in 1937)
exif: {}