Despite their strong association with banditry, the mounted bandits originated with
guerrilla activities by
vigilante self-defence organisations. With the decline of the
Qing Dynasty, public safety worsened, and Manchuria became infested with thieves. The locals formed self-defence organisations to counter this. But after the
1911 Revolution, as the chaos in Manchuria intensified, the more powerful vigilantes went beyond their original goal of self-defence and began acting as bandits themselves. During China's
Warlord era, it was common for warlords to call their enemies "bandits", and their actions against them "bandit extermination". The
Korean Independence Army was portrayed by Japanese propaganda as a mounted bandit gang, although that classification is disputed by South Korean historians. Some historians believe that the
Hunchun incident, which the Japanese used as a pretext for the
Gando Massacre, was in fact staged by Japanese-aligned mounted bandits. After the collapse of
Manchukuo in 1945, the mounted bandit system collapsed too. In the civil war between the
Kuomintang and the
Chinese Communist Party (the second phase of the
Chinese Civil War), the mounted bandits joined either camp and dispersed, eventually being assimilated into the army. ==Notable mounted bandits==