Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937
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Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822373032 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 36 MB |
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Revolutionary Nativism
Fascism and Culture in China, 1925â"1937
By Maggie Clinton
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7303-2
CHAPTER 1
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Fascist Factions during the Nanjing Decade
When Chiang Kai-shek's troops abruptly expunged Chinese Communists from their Soviet-backed United Front alliance in April 1927, Shanghai's famed department stores, cabarets, and cinemas appeared as backdrops for a combat dynamic that had been erupting in cities like Munich, Barcelona, Tokyo, and Turin. Just as quickly, these physical markers of China's colonial predicament were revealed to be integral parts of the struggle that had led to the Shanghai bloodbath in the first place. The men who orchestrated the purge and the ensuing White Terror publicly expressed their enthrallment with the wonders of the industrial age — from cars to factories to the late art deco curves of streamline moderne — and their intent to extract these wonders from their present imperialist, degenerate, and socially divisive trappings. Marshaling cutting-edge communications technologies from radio to film, and circulating their revolutionary aspirations via print media that embraced modernist aesthetics, the GMD perpetrators of the White Terror continually emphasized the world-historical newness of the nonbourgeois, non-Communist, and uniquely Chinese revolutionary course that they were charting. This course, they believed, would generate a nationally harmonious form of industrial modernity that circumvented the crises then faced by metropolitan democracies, and defend China's ancient cultural particularity against the twinned universalizing threats of Communism and liberal imperialism.
This chapter traces how interwar fascism constituted a nexus of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics that became manifest in China when developmental nationalists, reacting violently against real and imagined threats, anointed themselves vanguards of the future. Their agenda was revolutionary in its aspiration to introduce capitalist forms of production evenly throughout China's vast territory (while understanding themselves as anticapitalist) and in its assumption that doing so required the total transformation of Chinese social life. Yet it was also counterrevolutionary in its conviction that labor, feminist, civil rights, and internationalist movements were legitimately tamed or crushed by whatever means necessary. The main perpetrators of the GMD White Terror — men affiliated with its Blue Shirt and CCClique factions during the Nanjing Decade — did not envision returning China to a time before factories, films, or republican politics. Instead, they sought to construct a state with the power to harness modern social and technological forms and to police the nation's cultural boundaries. Despite the claims made by these GMD factions that they were following a uniquely Chinese revolutionary course prescribed by Sun Yat-sen, their national regenerative fantasies were akin to those of other interwar fascist movements, as was their conviction that they were charting a path beyond Communism and liberalism.
Interwar historical actors and contemporary scholars have long debated whether fascism should be regarded as revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Marxian commentators in particular, taking the Third Communist International's (Comintern) assessment of fascism as a last gasp of monopoly capitalism as a point of departure, have emphasized that whatever revolution fascists claimed to be fomenting merely reaffirmed existing capitalist property relations, this time disguised with Marxist iconography. In 1933, Ernst Bloch wrote of how Nazis first "stole the colour red, stirred things up with it. ... Then they stole the street, the pressure it exerts. ... All in all they pretended to be merely workers and nothing else. ... And finally they pretend to think of nothing except what will change things." Bloch emphasized that the Nazi was "not content with torturing and killing workers. He not only wants to smash the red front but also strips the jewelry off the supposed corpse." Fascists thereby violently appropriated from Marxism its signs and symbols as well as its organizational arena and mass appeal. These trappings could not disguise fascism's lack of transformative substance, however, or how its repression and co-optation of workers' movements merely reiterated extant capitalist terms. Yet, as Roger Griffin has succinctly argued, the claim that fascism was merely counterrevolutionary "betrays an inability on the part of some scholars to accept that some of [fascism's] idealists were (and still are) genuinely looking for an alternative to liberalism, communism, conservatism, and capitalism as the formula for resolving the problems of the modern age." When fascist aspirations to create a new social order are taken seriously, their transformative desires — from rescripting sexual relations to murdering the entirety of the world's Jewish population — stand out starkly. To stress only fascism's counterrevolutionary dimensions fails to account for such world-transformative impulses, especially the pronounced desire in China for industrial development and how thoroughly this would alter the general character of social life. To stress only its revolutionary aspects, meanwhile, neglects the terror it waged against egalitarian and internationalist movements.
The social character of GMD conceptions of revolution certainly differed from that of the Communists. It is nevertheless difficult not to concede their contextual radicalism, especially if we assume that much of China's hinterland was not subsumed by industrial capitalism at the time the United Front got under way. Sun Yat-sen's 1921 hymn to industrialization without social conflict, The International Development of China, for instance, mapped the wonderments of the machine age onto former Qing territory, reimagining terrain from Tibet to Manchuria as a tightly interlocked web of deep-water ports, railroad lines, and heavy-industrial centers. Sun's cornucopian understanding of China's "unlimited supplies of raw materials and cheap labor" figured China's industrial development as capable of resolving not just local problems but those of the world writ large. As reiterated in his 1924 Canton lectures on the "Three Principles of the People," Sun did not expect China to enter a historical stage through which the West and Japan had already passed, but rather did expect that the state-directed transformation of its rural property relations and urban production methods would generate a new kind of social order, one unsusceptible to global crises and domestic antagonisms. If the Nationalists' revolutionary record in the post-1927 period once appeared "abortive"— prematurely truncated not just by Japan's 1937 invasion but by the Nationalists' own corruption and incompetence — Nationalist achievements in developing state, economic, and legal infrastructures and in reclaiming rights from imperialist powers are now well documented. So, too, are the party's tenuous relations with both rural landed elites and urban capitalists. These successes and relations suggest the potency of the third way that party militants were attempting to chart. However truncated GMD labors may have been, its constant invocation of the term revolution (geming) during the Nanjing Decade was not merely empty rhetoric.
At the same time, the revolutionary aspirations of these GMD militants cannot be separated from their efforts to crush all forces of opposition. These efforts did not inevitably flow from Sun Yat-sen's developmental program. Rather, they were exerted by men who grew convinced that realizing their own interpretation of Sun's vision — and thereby resolving the nation's protracted crises — required dictatorial rule and justified state terror. During the 1923–27 Soviet-brokered period of cooperation between the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party, the GMD was reorganized along democratic centralist lines. It gained a disciplined party-army and its rhetoric became infused with the language of propaganda, masses, and mobilization. Party militants began to amplify a decades-germinating nationalist discourse that rejected the application of metropolitan class categories to Chinese circumstances, and cast the unified nation, bound together by Confucian culture, as the true agent of China's revolution. Soviet-style organization, Sunist ideas of elite-led development, and Confucian paternalism mutually imbued them with a sense of their own vanguardist authority vis-à-vis "the masses." After the GMD captured the state in 1927, the militants who constituted the party's Blue Shirt and CC Clique factions gained intermittent windows of opportunity to translate into practice their visions of remaking the nation in a maximally efficient and militantly hierarchical fashion. They exercised power largely through clandestine organizations that were by definition beyond public reproach while also actively participating in China's media circles, where they battled to eliminate all contending voices. Here, they marshaled modernist visual and linguistic signs to demonstrate their claims upon the future and the rightfulness of their own revolutionary leadership.
In the early twentieth century, desire for development knew few political boundaries. V. I. Lenin was as entranced by Henry Ford as was Le Corbusier. Mohandas K. Gandhi's anti-industrialism was a relative outlier in the global spectrum of anticolonial thought. Nevertheless, it must still be recognized that notions of development harbored highly varied ideas about who was entitled to make planning decisions, who would reap the benefits of promised progress, what kinds of people would perform manual and caregiving labor, how these forms of labor were to be socially valued, and what kinds of force could be used to convince the unconvinced. Whose knowledge mattered? What kinds of expertise? Who should have the authority to manage farms and factories, to regulate women's bodies, and to set the parameters of the working day? After 1927, powerful groups within the GMD became increasingly adamant that the party-state, charged with ushering the national masses into modernity, would be the ultimate arbiter of all such questions. In the remainder of this chapter I sketch the key organizations and figures on which this book focuses, highlighting how their beliefs and practices compel us to understand them as fascist.
In and Out of the Shadows: The Formation of the CC Clique and Blue Shirts
In 1929, Dai Jitao, a longtime associate of Sun Yat-sen, paid a visit to Sun's widow Song Qingling at her home in Shanghai's French concession. At the time, Dai was closely affiliated with the CC Clique and had just begun a nearly two-decade tenure as president of the Nationalist government's Examination Branch. Having served as the Whampoa Military Academy's propaganda director during the United Front period, and otherwise actively involved in crafting the Nationalists' image as the true inheritor of Sun Yat-sen's legacy (the specifics of which I discuss in chapter 2), Dai could barely suppress his irritation that Song refused to have anything to do with the new Nanjing regime. She had not only opted to settle in a colonial concession area beyond the sovereign jurisdiction of the Nationalist state, but she was increasingly allying with Nanjing's public critics. According to Song's record of the encounter, Dai visited largely to chastise her for drafting an unauthorized anti-imperialist telegram and for failing to publicly support the Nanjing regime. During the visit, Dai and Song challenged each other's interpretations of Sun's thought. Song charged Dai and the regime that he served with distorting and usurping Sun's ideas, particularly by perpetually deferring the promised transition to popular rule, which in her view reproduced the imperialist canard that the Chinese were "behind by several hundred years, that we do not understand law or order, and so we are not able to govern ourselves." Dai conversely charged Song with impatiently misunderstanding the temporality of Sun's revolutionary vision — which Dai estimated would take several hundred years rather than a single lifetime — and with willfully ignoring the material progress already evident in Nanjing, including the construction of a grand new boulevard named after Sun himself. Song's activism, Dai insisted, constituted an "attack on the government" that damaged China's image at a moment of acute international danger. It moreover aided and abetted the Communists, who were "guided by Moscow, and committing murder and arson all across China."
This tense exchange between Song Qingling and Dai Jitao contained dynamics at the heart of GMD fascism in the years leading up to Japan's invasion of China in 1937. Dai's accusation that Song did not understand the true nature of Sun's revolutionary vision, that her dissent endangered the safety of the republic, and that her actions aligned her with a foreign-directed Communist conspiracy constituted charges that fascists reiterated against their real and imagined enemies throughout the Nanjing Decade. Dai's insistence that he (and his GMD allies) possessed a knowledge of Sun's revolutionary vision that even Sun's widow did not comprehend was emblematic of their self-ascribed vanguardism as well as the new state's patriarchal posturing vis-à-vis its ostensibly wayward citizens. Whereas, Dai maintained, Nanjing had been hard at work pursuing a revolutionary course to provide for the nation's material welfare, women like Song carried on as if they knew what was best for themselves or for the nation as a whole. Dai's additional claim that Song's telegram endangered the nation at a time of international crisis, and that it abetted Communism, bespoke a logic that collapsed varying forms of political action into a catchall Communist menace. Because the Nanjing regime had already announced a Provisional List of Counterrevolutionary Crimes that made it a capital offense to form associations or to enter into alliances with foreigners perceived as subversive to the state, Dai's suggestion that Song's signature abetted a Moscow-directed Communist conspiracy contained the threat of capital punishment. In this way, Dai's 1929 visit to Song encapsulated an unfolding dynamic between men working to consolidate their own power within the government and a society that they by turns conceived as insubordinate, or as what Sun Yat-sen had termed buzhibujue — "ignorant and unconscious."
Song Qingling's privileged position as Sun's widow meant that she was relatively insulated from the violence that the state had meted out since 1927. During the first few years of the White Terror, targets of state violence were less frequently left-liberal elites like Song (though they would become targets by the early 1930s) than Communist organizers and urban workers. By 1929 the White Terror had already largely succeeded in pushing Communists out of the cities or so deeply underground that they were cut off from their now-decimated urban labor movement base. Historian Ming K. Chan has explained how, after April 1927, China's labor movement was quickly crushed and co-opted. Unions were " 'reorganized' and placed under tight control by the [GMD] authorities, and labor leaders and union members suspected of leftist affiliation were frequently arrested and executed wholesale." The power that unions had won during the early 1920s was greatly diminished as "outright repression by force and legal restriction continued after 1927 on a much larger and more systematic scale," and once left-leaning and Communist unions continued to operate but became "yellow unions run by labor bosses or secret society figures and often living under the shadow of employers." This repression was directly linked to what Chan called the "diehard party cadres of the CC Clique." Members of this clique, including Dai Jitao, Chen Lifu, and Chen Guofu, had a wide range of expertise, from Marxist theory to engineering. They also shared a passion for constructing a national future that would be neither liberal nor Communist.
THE CC CLIQUE
The existence of cliques and factions within the GMD has long been identified as a major cause of the state's overall weakness during the Nanjing Decade.Power struggles between differing party coalitions, whose memberships were often fluid, continued from the 1927 location of the new state in Nanjing until Wang Jingwei and other members of the party's left wing joined the Japanese occupation regime in 1940. The right wing–left wing split was a major but far from exclusive division within the GMD. Groups aligned with Chiang Kai-shek are often called the right wing, while groups aligned with Wang Jingwei the left wing as a result of their differing degrees of willingness to cooperate with Communists during the United Front. After Chiang's 1927 party purge, however, which forced the left wing to reconsider its allegiances, the Wang faction's "left wing" moniker became relatively meaningless even as strategic differences between left and right continued. As Margherita Zanasi has shown, when Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek formed a coalition government between 1932 and 1935 (during which time Chiang pursued anti-Communist military campaigns in the countryside), Wang's faction in Nanjing implemented corporatist economic development strategies that should be seen as fascistic in their own right, eroding whatever left-wing credibility they had had. Chiang Kai-shek's dominance within party and state structures was not reasonably secured until Wang Jingwei officially resigned in 1935; Chiang's ascent was greatly indebted to the labors of his CC Clique and Whampoa Clique–turned–Blue Shirt supporters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolutionary Nativism by Maggie Clinton. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. Hiding in Plain Sight: Fascist Factions during the Nanjing Decade 23
2. Spirit is Eternal: Cultural Revolution from the Right 64
3. Spiritual Offenses: The Nativist Prose of Counterinsurgency 98
4. Fixing the Everyday: The New Life Movement and Taylorized Modernity 128
5. Literature and Arts for the Nation 161
Conclusion 191
List of Characters for Selected Romanized Terms 201
Notes 205
Bibliography 239
Index 255
What People are Saying About This
"Maggie Clinton's book, written in luminous prose, succeeds brilliantly in embedding the development of 1920s and 1930s Chinese right-wing nativist thought and practice in complex domestic and global milieus. Weaving together discussions of culture critique and nativist defense, of political consolidation and economic upheaval, as well as of military strategy and ordinary violence, Revolutionary Nativism reveals the grassroots sources and everyday appeal of fascist social analysis and activism. A compelling account with deep resonance for our contemporary moment."
"An important contribution, Revolutionary Nativism shows how a strain of fascism in early twentieth-century China attempted to mold a vast and preindustrial country into a modern nation-state. Maggie Clinton tells this story with critical insight and historical sympathy, helping to enrich our understanding of fascism in China and central issues in Chinese modernity."