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When a government has little real reach into the countryside, local stability ends up resting on informal power holders, even violent ones. Officials themselves have to rely on secret-society leaders to settle local affairs. The same group can supply both violence and order.
Where families live dispersed and independent rather than in clustered villages, kinship ties loosen. Voluntary associations and their charitable, populist programs step into the gap and can matter more than clans or even the state. That makes such regions fertile ground for secret societies.
In a cold, poor region, isolated households struggle to survive alone, which pushes families to depend on one another. In a warm, productive, commercialized region, families can afford to live more independently. Ecology shapes how tightly people are bound together.
When farmers live within a short walk of a market, the teahouses where they spend their leisure become the real centers of rural social life. An organization that runs those places sits at the hub of local news, disputes and loyalty. In Sichuan many such teahouses were run by the secret brotherhood.
Top-down modernization campaigns left rural life largely 'cloaked in the past several centuries.' Worse for the reformers, the disruption opened room for traditional secret societies to grow. Reform that cannot penetrate local society can end up strengthening what it meant to replace.
Earlier regimes could not dislodge entrenched local brotherhoods. The Communist state succeeded because it paired brute force with broad grassroots support. Even so, its social systematization could not be applied uniformly everywhere.