Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2017. xi, 268 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6377-4.
In her book Revolutionary Nativism, Maggie Clinton argues that between the years 1925 and 1937, following the iconoclasm and anti-Confucianism of the May Fourth Movement, the “right radicalized theorists” of the Guomindang (GMD), such as members of the New Life Movement and the CC (Central Committee) Clique, contributed to the reversal of “the historical fortunes of Confucianism” (198) in the twentieth century. They achieved this by “rendering Confucianism compatible with a path of modernization” (199). This “revolutionary nativism” and cross-class alliance are echoed in contemporary brands of Confucius Institutes, the celebration of a harmonious society, and in “Cold War champions of Asian values” (198–199). Clinton approaches the confrontation between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang (GMD), as a local manifestation of the confrontation of the two ideologies inherent in interwar politics, since they ended up on different sides of the communist-fascist world ideological axis.
This book not only examines the two parties’ violent feud in the 1930s through the lens of the ideological war between communism and fascism, it also explores the local roots of the rise of what Clinton calls GMD fascism, which was anti-internationalist, eschewed political liberalism and laissez-fair capitalism, and valourized the nation and “masculine prowess” (11). GMD fascism, an “extreme manifestation of nationalism” (4), was not a copy of European or Japanese models, though it was inspired by them it originated in China’s post-dynastic conditions (13). Among adepts of the GMD New Life Movement and CC Clique, “invocation of traditional values masked a profound reordering of the social world,” and included “a rationalized military or a Taylorized factory” (159).
This book examines the writings of such GMD leaders as Sun Yatsen and Dai Jitao, as well as the published periodicals and cultural production of the New Life Movement and CC Clique, as they attributed a special place to culture (16). Aesthetically, both the right-wing GMD and the CCP embraced the same “modern” aesthetics (188). Clinton explores the idiosyncratic relationship of the GMD with the notion of “revolutionary”: while the GMD espoused Confucian elitism (170), they also claimed revolutionary leadership (7). The United Front of 1923 to 1927 shaped the GMD’s militarized and technocratic milieus (chapter 1) and allowed them to fashion themselves as “anticonservative political vanguards” (21) in opposition to a foreign-directed communist insurgency, with the GMD’s fascist Blue Shirts claiming to have brought native things back to China (142). The GMD bound Confucianism and national revolutionary culture together with industrial modernity (chapter 2). This nativist discourse allowed the GMD to paint the Communists as anti-national and anti-Chinese, thus justifying their anti-Communist violence, to include both military campaigns and repentance camps (fanxingyuan) which propagated Confucian morality, the absence of which among Communists they argued excluded them from the Chinese nation (chapter 3). Confucian values were mobilized as a “bedrock of alternative modernity” for the needs of industrial productivity (chapter 4) and of the creation of “nationalist literature and arts” (minzu wenyi) that justified violence against leftist intellectuals (chapter 5).
This study not only places the New Life Movement in the context of 1930s Italian, German, and Japanese fascism, but also situates the GMD fascist-inspired movement in the larger international context, including Soviet and American influences and the confrontation between them. Though it had a different agenda, the GMD shared with the CCP a “politico-intellectual genealogy,” that is, a Leninist influence and anti-imperialist ideology (33). Parallels between CCP postwar production and even political campaigns and the GMD’s New Life rhetoric do exist (197–198), and GMD ideas concerning discipline, self-sacrifice for the nation, casting the “productive members of the society” (151), family cohesion, and the role of women in nation-building and deference to authority could be found in both fascist and non-fascist regimes (145). The labour ideals of the 1930s built on Fordism and Taylorism in various contexts, such as in the Soviet Union (148), but the distinct characteristic of this trend within the GMD was that those values in China were used to save the Chinese from social collapse (145).
This thought-provoking study raises new questions. While the fascists of the Nanjing decade based their vision on “native Confucianism” and “ignored everything that did not fit with their visions of a new order” (143), the GMD built its regional policy on ideas reminiscent of internationalism, even if designed in direct opposition to it (Craig Smith, “China as the Leader of the Weak and Small: The Ruoxiao Nations and Guomindang Nationalism,” Cross-Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review 24 [2017]: 36–60). Also, Sun Yatsen was not entirely anti-internationalist (74), but linked internationalism and nationalism together (Sun Zhongshan, “Sanminzhuyi: minzuzhuyi” [Three principles: nationalism], lecture 4, 17 February 1924, in Sun zhongshan quan ji [Collected works of Sun Zhongshan], 11 vols., Beijing: Zhong hua shuju, 1986, 9: 220–231, esp. p. 226). In the context of the interwar global moment, can we consider the nativization trend in GMD China as unique, or can we see it as a part of the indigenization trend of interwar globalization, which was the other side of the internationalization of organizations and ideologies?
Anna Belogurova
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany