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Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890-1930
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1985
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February 17, 2026
Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China, 1890-1930, by Fewsmith is indispensable to anyone interested in the Nanjing Decade. He offers a correction to Coble’s inability to see the social standing of some elites in the face of the terror wrought by the GMD. Fewsmith is able to articulate a comparison of the Nationalist government with other expressions of an ‘authoritarian’ political genus that saw its heyday in the early to mid twentieth centuries, with different species evolving in diverse ways from Portugal to Italy.
He demonstrates the ways in which state corporatism preempted autonomous grassroots association, prevented the emergence of competing organizations, defended by ceding certain rights that corporatist associations would spend more time defending than lobbying or agitating for more rights, and compartmentalized conflicts to subdue their spread into larger issues. Furthermore, Fewsmith argues that a form of bureaucratic capitalism, one characterized by rampant, but not random, corruption formed among factions. He gives examples of various cliques and factions within the government vying for power so as to be allocated more resources. For example, T. V. Soong did not merely assume control of the Bank of China when it was nationalized, but did so to advance the interests of his faction.
The Nationalist regime was effective in demobilizing society. It achieved a sort of ‘harmonization,’ one of its stated goals, through making interest associations “functionless, [but] did not make them superfluous.” (p. 193) Finally, Fewsmith argues that the GMD’s inability to remain a ‘combat party,’ by ceding its revolutionary language in disputes among merchants and finance in the aftermath of the purge of communists, turning instead towards “construction, unity, and administration [particularly of class relations],” (p. 194) led to its later incapacity and delegitimization, and, further, the inability for the party to subordinate the state. “Severed from its anchorage in party organization, revolutionary ideology becomes regime mentality.” (p. 195) Through the co-optation of elites ingratiating themselves to Chiang, reliance on the GMD as Party weakened. This gave Chiang the ability to become the ‘sole link’ between various factions. Factions could not function against the regime, but could pursue their own interests as part of it. (p. 203)
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He demonstrates the ways in which state corporatism preempted autonomous grassroots association, prevented the emergence of competing organizations, defended by ceding certain rights that corporatist associations would spend more time defending than lobbying or agitating for more rights, and compartmentalized conflicts to subdue their spread into larger issues. Furthermore, Fewsmith argues that a form of bureaucratic capitalism, one characterized by rampant, but not random, corruption formed among factions. He gives examples of various cliques and factions within the government vying for power so as to be allocated more resources. For example, T. V. Soong did not merely assume control of the Bank of China when it was nationalized, but did so to advance the interests of his faction.
The Nationalist regime was effective in demobilizing society. It achieved a sort of ‘harmonization,’ one of its stated goals, through making interest associations “functionless, [but] did not make them superfluous.” (p. 193) Finally, Fewsmith argues that the GMD’s inability to remain a ‘combat party,’ by ceding its revolutionary language in disputes among merchants and finance in the aftermath of the purge of communists, turning instead towards “construction, unity, and administration [particularly of class relations],” (p. 194) led to its later incapacity and delegitimization, and, further, the inability for the party to subordinate the state. “Severed from its anchorage in party organization, revolutionary ideology becomes regime mentality.” (p. 195) Through the co-optation of elites ingratiating themselves to Chiang, reliance on the GMD as Party weakened. This gave Chiang the ability to become the ‘sole link’ between various factions. Factions could not function against the regime, but could pursue their own interests as part of it. (p. 203)
This book gets four big boom!
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
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