Different styles

Military, Revolutionary leadership

Hakkas started and formed the backbone of the Taiping Rebellion, the largest uprising in the modern history of China. It had, at one stage, occupied one-third of China and almost toppled the Qing dynasty. Hakkas continued to play leading roles during the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty.

The famous Long March began with 86,000 soldiers, of which more than 70% were Hakkas. When the People's Liberation Army had its rank structure from 1955 to 1964, the highest number of generals, totalling 54, came from the small Hakka county of Xingguo in Jiangxi province. The county had also previously produced 27 Nationalist generals. Xingguo county is thus known as the Generals' County. Meizhou alone which consisted of 7 Hakka counties has produced 474 generals.

Besides playing leading roles in all the three major revolutions of China, Hakkas had also been prominently involved in many of the wars against foreign intrusion of China. 

During the war against the Japanese, both the commander-in-chiefs of the two main Chinese communist forces, Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army, are Hakkas: Zhu De and Ye Ting. On the Nationalist side, Xue Yue and Zhang Fakui were commander-in-chiefs for the 9th and 4th War Zones respectively. Called the "Patton of Asia" by the West and the "God of War" (戰神) by the Chinese, Xue was China's most outstanding general during the war, having won several major battles which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops.

Overseas Hakkas have also been prominent politically in the countries they had migrated to, many of which are leading political figures of the countries or the Chinese communities there. Since the 20th century, there have been twenty Hakkas who had become heads of state or heads of government in different countries.