Maggie Clinton

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 fascism 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 suggestion 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.… (altro)