text: Rural Society Historian Prasenjit Duara coins the cultural nexus of power to characterize the power dynamics in rural North China. The network of rural cultural institutions, including lineage and religions, legitimized local gentry to institutionalize their interpersonal privileges and achieved grassroots autonomy. However, this power structure was disintegrated during the first half of the twentieth century as the Nationalist government expanded its fiscal power over local communities by establishing new state agencies to collect the tax. Confronted with the heavy burden of the various taxes, the protective brokerage, the gentry who used to collect tax in a sustainable way, retreated from the rural governance and gave their way to the entrepreneurial brokerage, i.e., the local bullies, who collected tax for-profit and impaired the ecology of the rural economy. This process destroyed the alliance among the state, local elites, and rural people without establishing a new system to replace the long-existing power nexus.
  Peasant economy also persisted throughout the Republic era. According to Hung, Despite all the economic and social changes happening in the late Qing and Republican era, the peasant economy, particularly in the form of handicraft and household cotton industry, continued to prevail and dominate the rural areas.
  Urban Workforce
  In the urban workplace, native-place origins of workers were closely related to the job opportunities. In Shanghai, people with different native-place origins fell into different industries and occupations. Examples were carpenters from Canton and coppersmith from Ningbo. For refugee migrants from the countryside who had fewer native-place bonds and skillsets, they often found affiliation in gang activities and developed community solidarity. Strikes often happened in waves. The May Fourth Movement marked one substantial increase in labor strikes in Shanghai and later culminated again in 1937 at the beginning of the Japanese invasion. Strikes again increased during the Civil War period because of the rising inflation.