China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949 by Brian Tsui (review)

In China’s Conservative Revolution, Brian Tsui unveils the social revolution led by the Nationalist Party, which aimed to build a productive and orderly national community in order to resist both mass political participation and Western materialism. Terming it a “conservative revolution” characterizes the movement as a countercur-rent against radical revolution pushing for social rearrangement. Tsui argues that the Nationalist pursuit of modernity and social reconstruction raised the importance of national priority, spiritual development, and interclass cooperation. To inoculate Chinese nationals with their ideology, the Nationalists attempted to discipline people by reforming their daily behavior and to deliver new popular culture through aesthetic cultivation. Beyond filling a serious gap in the narrative of Chinese revolutionary history, which has usually focused on the Communist-led movements, the book sheds new light on how the Nationalist vision of the national future interacted with that of the Communists, the Fascists, the Japanese, other Asian countries, and Western industrial modernity.

The author thoroughly discusses the conservative revolution as a political ethics formulated by Nationalist advisers. This became the governing approach that provided new social and cultural experiences for the masses, formed a common ground to rally support from nonpartisan intellectuals, and developed a new pan-Asianism to help build an international wartime alliance. In chapter 2, Tsui traces the intellectual origin of these new social ideals back to the 1920s through the interpretations—by Dai Jitao (戴季陶 1891–1949) and others—of Sun Yat-sen’s principle of minsheng (民生 people’s livelihood). For Tsui, the emphasis on interclass unity and spiritual fullness also explains the ideological conflicts between the Communists and the Nationalists that led to the 1927 anti-Communist purge. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the ways in which a blueprint of social well-being that mingled personal development with national solidarity guided the organization of social movements such as the scouting movement and the wartime National Spiritual movement. Chapter 5 examines the inclusiveness of the conservative revolution, and Tsui explains how the governing approach and social ideals successfully appealed to domestic nonpartisan liberalists who opposed mass politics. Chapter 6 explores the international dimension of the revolution by introducing the Nationalists’ pan-Asianist project, which was based on national ethics and moral rejuvenation and which struck a chord with Indian anti-British nationalist movements. For Tsui, this alliance showcased a new mode of international relations based on common “moral and philosophical outlooks rather than economic and political interests” (217). In sum, the book presents the Nationalists as contributing to a multifaceted conservative revolution through an examination [End Page E-17] of intellectual history, social movements, everyday culture, propaganda, and diplomatic politics during the two decades after the establishment of the Nanjing government.

Counter to the general impression of the Nationalists’ standing during the Second World War, the book brings our attention back to China’s continuous intellectual connection with Germany and Japan, from whom the Nationalists drew inspirations for nation-building projects. It convincingly shows that the Nationalists’ opposition to Axis powers did not prevent them from modeling their propaganda strategies after the Germans and Italians, whom they believed to have successfully engaged the masses and reached spiritual uniformity. Some party elites even held their enemy Japan in very high regard and admired the Japanese education system and mobilization policies. The author’s findings about the shift of the Guomindang (GMD) regime’s governing model from the Bolshevik model under Sun Yat-sen to the model of the European radical right parties in the 1930s reminds us of the global influence of Fascism beyond Axis territories.

The book paints the party’s ideological programs in a moderate hue and illuminates the capacity of conservative ideals to incorporate many people who might have been considered liberals into the Nationalist visions for the nation-state. This is arguably the most important contribution of the book. As shown in chapter 3, the party-led...