Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937

by Maggie Clinton

In Revolutionary Nativism Maggie Clinton traces the history and cultural politics of fascist organizations that operated under the umbrella of the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD) during the 1920s and 1930s. Clinton argues that fascism was not imported to China from Europe or Japan; rather it emerged from the charged social conditions that prevailed in the country's southern and coastal regions during the interwar period. These fascist groups were led by young militants who believed that reviving China's Confucian "national spirit" could foster the discipline and social cohesion necessary to defend China against imperialism and Communism and to develop formidable industrial and military capacities, thereby securing national strength in a competitive international arena. Fascists within the GMD deployed modernist aesthetics in their literature and art while justifying their anti-Communist violence with nativist discourse. Showing how the GMD's fascist factions popularized a virulently nationalist rhetoric that linked Confucianism with a specific path of industrial development, Clinton sheds new light on the complex dynamics of Chinese nationalism and modernity.

Genres: History, China, 20th Century

280 pages, Hardcover

Published March 31, 2017

Reviews

[LaMarx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maggie Clinton’s Revolutionary Nativism is an example of the best historical scholarship has to offer. Fascism outside of Europe, aside from Japan, is criminally understudied. I am of the belief that studying these manifestations that get less attention in the literature is key to grasping the general trends of fascistic politics. Much of the literature on fascism in the Axis-aligned nations of the Second World War (understandably) focuses on their large-scale atrocities.
Clinton shows the ways that fascism developed in China, under a nativist interpretation of Sun Yat-sen, a corporatist Confucian ethos, catch-up industrial developmentalism, and expedient violence. Read this book. See my notes on Substack. It gets five big booms. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This monograph represents hard-core academic writing, which often means that it feels as though Clinton is trying to be so precise in her typology that her analysis vanishes into thin air. Still, if you have the background and patience, Clinton has some useful things to say about Chinese politics, ca. 1927-1937, starting with the title of the book, which is about the best simple descriptor of what fascism means in practice I've yet seen. Essentially though, Clinton is interested in talking about two particular factions of the Kuomintang; the CC Clique on one hand, and the Blue Shirts on the other.

To be simple about it, the CC Clique were essentially aspirant technocrats with Fordist tendencies, whereas the Blue Shirts came out of the Whampoa Military Academy and who had come see the common front with the Chinese Communist Party as merely opening up China to another avenue of imperialist aggression. Besides that though, what these factions had in common was a belief that there was a certain Chinese essential character that transcended the whole of Chinese history, they believed in top-down solutions to social problems, and they believed that emergency measures were needed to sustain the Chinese state; justifying the eliminationist politics of Nanjing's "white terror" against the CCP.

What made the program of these factions "revolutionary," and not just hard-knuckled authoritarianism, is that they proclaimed their own rejection of the "feudal" elements of China's imperial part. They believed in modern technology and industry. Their aesthetics were contemporary stream-line "moderne." Finally, they believed that Western Liberalism had also failed China, so there was a deep suspicion of the great capitalist powers. The basic problem is that they never had quite enough time to produce a political platform that could be used to mobilize the masses, before the 1937 war with Japan commenced.

Clinton finishes her book by considering how the program of the hard-liners of the KMT might be reflected in the acts of the CCP successor state, besides making further suggestions for research. She does touch on questions of gender and the KMT's beliefs in terms of "managing" the female body; that could probably be a book in and of itself.

Rating: 3.5 is more accurate than 4.0, but I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt.

[Nico Cornejo · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a review, this is mostly a reflection on some ideas of the book.
A common question in today’s societies is if the ascendant far right can be characterized as fascist. A lot has been written on this topic, and I don’t want to dwell too much on that, but a common issue that I see in these debates is that usually fascism is reduced to nazism. Even Italian fascism, which is the “proper” fascism, is mostly ignored. The domination of the nazi archetype has developed on the detriment of every other fascism, and Chinese fascism is not an exception. I would say that most people, even within the small field of people interested in the Republican Period, ignore that the GMD has very strong fascist influences. As Clinton explains in the conclusion of the book, this is partly because the fact that the GMD led Republic of China became a member of the Allies, fought Japan, and after WWII was recognized by the Western powers as the “Free China” that opposed the “totalitarian communists”.
Historians have for long known that this is not true. In 1972 Lloyd Eastman published his classic paper “Fascism in Kuomintang China: The Blue Shirts”. And in 1997, in the special issue of The China Quarterly that presented revisionist views of Republican China, Frederick Wakeman published “A Revisionist view of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism”. Between those two articles, debates raged about the true nature of the GMD during the Nanjing decade. It tells us something, I think, that the debate continues to this day, with Clinton’s book being one of the latest contributions to the topic.
The evidence is in a sense incontrovertible, as this books details. Both the Blue Shirts Society and the CC Clique were deeply inspired by Italian and German fascism. Jiang Jieshi liked to compare himself with Hitler and Mussolini. And as Zanasi has shown in her excellent book on the topic, even the “left wing” of the GMD under the authority of Wang Jingwei openly flirted with fascism (to the point that Wang defected to Japan). The problem then is not so much the abundant evidence, but our conception of what qualified as fascism.
I believe that it was difficult to admit the character of important factions of the GMD because of three main reasons, besides the alliances of the world war. One is that in many cases fascism is defined functionally, as “a totalitarian regime”. Which the GMD never was. At best, the Nanjing decade can be considered as a failed case of fascism.
On the other hand, if we look at ideology, organizations like the CC Clique and the Blue Shirts were anti-imperialist. The same happens with the China Youth Party, that during the Nanjing Decade was opposed to the GMD because of its timidity in resisting the Japanese encroachment. This stands in contrast with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the German Lebensraum, and Japanese expansionism.
So if we assume that totalitarianism and imperialism (or at least expansionism) are crucial characteristics of fascism, the CC Clique and the Blue Shirts cannot be fascist. A final aspect that is usually mentioned is the mobilization of the population that is sometimes taken as a key element of fascism. However, here we have a characteristic that is disputed, because it would be difficult to describe Imperial Japan or Franco’s Spain as fascist in that case.
So, if we look at the GMD and its fascist factions, we get some mixed results: it was a state that aspired to the levels of social control and homogenization that they saw in Italy and Germany, but could never achieve it. It shared with Italy, Germany and Japan the revisionist perspective of trying to overturn the post-great war order, but this did not meant expansion to other territories. It shared the anti-communist focus of the fascists (this is well documented by Clinton), but could never achieve there the level of success that their inspiration had.
The Chinese fascists also claimed to represent the national spirit, but they were not conservatives. In this they shared what Clinton has aptly described as a key contradiction inside all fascist ideologies: the return to the past via revolutionary means, of national “rejuvenation”. The longing for a return to a national, gender and hierarchical order that was gone but could be restored by modern means.
Books like this one makes us confront the fact that fascism was never a simple formula that we could use to classify a political party or movement. When we confront contemporary politics and we ask ourselves “is this fascism?” we should consider the whole spectrum of family resemblances between the different types of fascism around the world, and not only certain features that appear in one or two of them. The result, on the other hand, can not simply be a yes/no answer, but a rational analysis of how the past can teach us ways to deal with the present.

[Mills College Library]

320.53 C6418 2017