Big Swords Society

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The Big Swords Society was a traditional peasant self-defence group, widespread in North China and noted for their reckless courage.

The Grand Masters of these societies claimed to make the members invulnerable to bullets by magic. Both the Big Swords and Red Spears societies had taken part in the Boxer Rebellion in North China in 1900. During the first three decades of the 20th century, many peasants emigrated to the Northeast from the Shandong and Hebei provinces where the Boxers had been most influential. The peasants revived the Big Swords Society as a measure of self-defence against the depredations of bandits. In 1927, the Fengtian government's harsh taxes and ill-treatment of local people in the Linjiang area, close to the Korean border, led to the Big Swords Society being organised there on a large scale. In January 1928, the Society rebelled against the Fengtian government, seizing the town of Tonghua for a short time. In the face of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, this traditional form of popular self-defence was revived.