Redefining the Moral and Legal Roles of the State in Everyday Life: The New Life Movement in China in the Mid-1930s

Abstract

Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement in Nanchang in February 1934 to revive traditional morality by reforming people’s daily behavior. In response to civil leader Wang Jingwei’s challenge, Chiang agreed to deploy moral suasion to urge the Chinese people to observe the New Life directives, but he still integrated the movement into government routine and relied on government agents, especially policemen, to implement it. Contemporary politicians and commentators understood this movement as an effective way to cultivate qualified citizens and to maintain social order in the power void caused by the retreat of the traditional rule of morality and the deficiency of the rule of law, so the New Life Movement was located in a new domain of state control between morality and law. Although this new domain was similar to the Western state apparatus of disciplining the population to produce “docile bodies” in the Foucauldian sense, it was actually an integral part of China’s own modernizing process, in which the state redefined its moral and legal role in people’s everyday lives in order to build a modern nation-state.

Introduction

The New Life Movement was the first state-sponsored campaign to reform people’s everyday lives in modern China. Chiang Kai-shek launched the movement in 1934 in Nanchang, the location of his military headquarters. He defined “New Life” in terms of the traditional moral doctrines of propriety, righteousness, integrity, and conscience (li, yi, lian, chi), but, as the first step in this movement to revive national morality, Chiang chose to focus on disciplined and hygienic behavior. To achieve this goal, he demanded that government agents, together with students and other reformed individuals, supervise the population in following directives calling for “orderliness” (guiju) and “cleanliness” (qingjie). These directives normalized the infinitesimal details of people’s everyday conduct, including how they should walk, dress, behave in public, and practice personal hygiene.

Historians understand the political meaning of this state-sponsored movement in different ways. Earlier scholarship tends to emphasize that the New Life Movement strengthened Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship and tightened the state’s control of society. Arif Dirlik studies the ideology of the New Life Movement and argues that this movement represented a “modern counterrevolution” rather than an “anti-revolutionary conservatism,” because it instrumentalized traditional morality for totalitarianism (Dirlik 1975, 975). Lloyd Eastman traces the origins of this totalitarianism and contends that the New Life Movement, disguised by Confucian tenets, was actually a fascist movement to elevate Chiang as the absolute national leader, mimicking Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy (1974, 66–70). William Kirby reinforces Eastman’s argument and regards the New Life Movement as an unsuccessful imitation of German fascism (1984, 145–185). Making this narrative more precise, Frederic Wakeman argues that Chiang Kai-shek mixed “fascist military discipline” with “the classic Neo-Confucian view of community hierarchy and lineage solidarity” and that this “Confucian fascism” failed to truly mobilize the masses as European fascism did (1997, 425–428). This narrative highlights the New Life Movement’s totalitarian political aspirations of expanding state power into people’s everyday lives, and the analogy between fascism and the New Life Movement implies that this movement was something abnormal and wrong in the development of the modern Chinese state.

In contrast, more recent scholarship regards the New Life Movement as a necessary reform in the long process of building a modern state. Instead of looking at it as a political movement consolidating Chiang’s personal power and authority, Duan Ruicong argues that this movement embodied Chiang’s ideal of state building and helped Chiang centralize state power in order to resist the pending Japanese invasion (2006, 178–213). Federica Ferlanti’s study of the New Life Movement in Nanchang praises the intent of this movement to shape new citizens and create national identity in a modern state (2010). Foucault’s theory of discipline and the body politic pushes this state-building narrative further by explaining why the New Life directives on “orderliness” and “cleanliness” were valued so highly in the state-building process. Both Hwang Jinlin (1998) and Hideo Fukamachi (2008) use Foucault’s theory to argue that Chiang Kai-shek intended to use the New Life Movement to produce “docile bodies” serving the modern state. Robert Culp studies civics training in secondary schools during the New Life Movement and also finds that the “management of bodies” was the shared goal of government agencies, students, and local educators, despite their different approaches (2006). These studies suggest that the attempt of the New Life Movement to intervene in people’s lives was embedded in the modern state’s demand for qualified citizens rather than simply derived from Chiang’s personal desire for dictatorship, so the movement might be unsuccessful but still legitimate.

Both the fascist narrative and the state-building narrative point out the essential characteristics of the movement—namely, the expanding role of the state in everyday life; the narratives’ opposing evaluations of the movement are to some extent due to the frames of reference they use. With fascist Germany as the analogy, the attempt of the state to regulate people’s lives appears as interference with individual freedom. By contrast, when based on Foucault’s criticism of discipline and the body politic in modern—even liberal—states, the same attempt can be regarded as a universal phenomenon in the modernizing process. Meanwhile, positioning the New Life Movement in the trajectory of modern Chinese history reveals some unique characteristics of China’s state-building process, especially the moral and legal responsibilities of the modern nation-state.

The New Life Movement represents an intriguing moment in the transformation from late imperial China to a modern Chinese state, a moment during which a negotiating process redefined the moral and legal boundaries limiting the intervention of state power in people’s everyday lives. Instead of treating the New Life Movement as a project representing a coherent ideology, this article focuses on the movement’s internal “faults.” It starts with Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei’s dispute about whether coercive government power or moral suasion should be used to implement the New Life directives in the early stage of the movement.¹ It then examines the discussion, ongoing since the late Qing, of the relationship between the rule of morality and the rule of law. Contemporary commentators expected the New Life Movement to fill in the gap in social control caused by the retreat of the rule of morality and the deficiency of the rule of law, but their articulation of the movement illustrated that this state-sponsored campaign had introduced a new political ideology transcending the dualism of law and morality. The deployment of police power in the implementation of the New Life Movement further indicated that the Nationalist regime was attempting to achieve the task of a modern state—namely, disciplining the population through normalization, in the Foucauldian sense, in a new arena of state power different from morality and law. However, it understood this new task within the old political framework and failed to institutionalize it with a systematic disciplinary mechanism.

Coercive Interference Versus Moral Suasion: Chiang Kai-Shek and Wang Jingwei’s Dispute

As a military man, Chiang Kai-shek believed in the importance of coercive power in maintaining social order and shaping people’s daily conduct. In a series of speeches to military officers, army political instructors, and policemen in Nanjing in April and May 1932, Chiang explained that he expected the army and police to behave as models for society so as to transplant the ideal of disciplined soldiers to the common people.² He thought policemen, as government agents in direct contact with the people, should shoulder particular responsibility for social reform. In a speech to Nanjing police officers on April 11, 1932, he said, “In order to establish an organized and civilized society, the police should use all kinds of methods to supervise and train the common people to have discipline, pay attention to hygiene, keep everything clean, and follow rules” (Chiang 2003, 65).³ As these speeches show, even before the New Life Movement, Chiang recognized that disciplining the population was the duty of the state and was inclined to rely on police power to assume this role.

One week before the official launch of the New Life Movement on February 19, 1934, Chiang instructed all military, party, and government officials in Nanchang that, in order to revive the nation, they should assume the responsibilities of educating people about morality, cultivating people’s good daily conduct, and disciplining people to obey orders (Jiangxi minbao, February 13, 1934). This instruction set the tone for the New Life Movement as a state-sponsored campaign reliant on government agents for implementation. In the early stages of the movement in Nanchang, Chiang demanded that civil servants, policemen, and military police, in addition to students, instruct the common people about what constituted the New Life. As the New Life Movement was implemented, government agents and students closely supervised the people and encouraged them to follow the directives on orderliness and cleanliness. This effort took the form of the first citywide cleanup, which ended with a large-scale in-depth examination of households. According to a news report in Jiangxi National Daily (Jiangxi minbao) on March 20, 1934, more than seven hundred inspectors selected from students, the Nanchang Military Headquarters, military police, the provincial party headquarters, the Bureau of Mass Education, and policemen formed 189 groups. These groups, each of which consisted of three inspectors led by a policeman, examined almost every household in Nanchang. They scrutinized even small details of private spaces, such as kitchens, toilets, living rooms, and bedrooms, as well as the sanitary condition of public spaces.⁴ The campaign for orderliness also relied on party members, military police, civil police[men], and students to inspect and instruct people in the streets (Minguo ershisan 1935, 110).

Wang Jingwei (also known as Wang Zhaoming), formerly a major political opponent of Chiang, was cooperating with him at that time as the leader of the civilian government, the head of the Executive Yuan. Wang opposed the use of government agents and coercive police power to implement the New Life Movement. On March 30, 1934, he articulated his concern in a telegram to Chiang, after Lai Lian, the secretary-general of the Nanjing municipal government and Chiang’s loyal disciple, proposed to follow Nanchang’s example and to inspect and discipline people’s bodies, houses, and daily lives to implement the New Life Movement in Nanjing. In the telegram, Wang distinguished between morality and law: “Morality sets the highest standard [of behavior], but the law should only enforce the minimum acceptable standard.” The power of law enforcement was so strong, Wang warned, that it should be used very carefully to avoid abuse. For him, the New Life Movement occupied the domain of morality, so he asserted that the implementation of this movement should avoid legal interference and rely instead on moral influence. “Even if legal or administrative power has to be used to correct degenerate and wicked behavior,” Wang suggested, “public consensus [against such behavior] should first be established and then the law or regulations [targeting such behavior] can be promulgated to enforce obedience by all” (Wang Zhaoming 1934a). Wang Jingwei challenged Chiang’s use of government agents, especially police, with the principle of the rule of law. According to this principle, policemen and other government agents had no right to use legal and administrative power to enter people’s homes and examine and intervene in their private lives without the support of related law, so Wang regarded Chiang’s deployment of policemen in the New Life Movement as an abuse of the state’s coercive power and a violation of people’s freedom to control their own homes and bodies.⁵

Since Wang Jingwei opposed the use of coercive police power to maintain social order beyond the scope of enacted laws, he moved the function of order maintenance into the domain of morality. In a speech delivered on April 8, 1934, he elaborated on his preference for moral influence over coercive power in the implementation of the New Life Movement. He advocated instead increasing the power of “social punishment” (shehui zhicai)—namely, the use of social norms to discipline people. For example, if someone spat in a theater, others in the audience would condemn him, instead of a policeman punishing him. To strengthen the power of social punishment, Wang asserted, “the educated class must discipline themselves first to lay a solid foundation for the New Life.” He believed that the educated elite could increase the power of social punishment so that “everyone would follow the directives of orderliness and cleanliness naturally and thus become qualified citizens” (Wang Zhaoming 1934b). His emphasis on “social punishment” implies that he understood the New Life Movement as a moral reform based on the elite’s moral appeal, instead of as a state-sponsored campaign using state agents to directly force popular compliance.⁶

In response to this challenge, Chiang Kai-shek immediately sent Wang Jingwei a public telegram, which was published in Jiangxi National Daily in Nanchang on April 5. This telegram modified the implementation guidelines for the New Life Movement.⁷ In it, Chiang accepted part of Wang’s suggestion. He agreed that the New Life Movement should start with public employees, soldiers, and students, and then expand to the common people, spreading from public spaces to private spaces. He also agreed that the movement should reform people’s lives through persuasion rather than coercion and should encourage voluntary participation. Chiang claimed, “The state need not enforce [the New Life Movement] through laws. Party, government, and military cadres, in particular, should not monopolize [this movement], lest the people lose interest in participating.” Bowing to Wang’s criticism that he had abused state power by having government agents intervene in people’s lives, Chiang limited the initial range of the movement to those closest to the reach of state power and to public spaces under the direct surveillance of the state and planned to rely on these reformed cadres to influence all of society through moral suasion later on.

While Wang Jingwei used the demarcation between law and morality and the principle of the rule of law to restrict the use of coercive power in the New Life Movement, Chiang made a distinction between “morality” and “life” to justify the deployment of state power to discipline people’s everyday lives. For Chiang, the directives of the New Life Movement were the basic norms of daily conduct that all people should follow. In other words, these directives consisted of minimum requirements for people’s lives, unlike morality, which “sets the highest standard [of behavior],” as Wang understood. In a lecture given on March 26, 1934, Chiang stated that the New Life Movement “should renew the whole of life and be practiced at every moment, in every detail, and in every action. … Its scope and time are absolutely unlimited” (Chiang 1934a, 178). In his public telegram to Wang Jingwei on April 5, Chiang further emphasized, “Personal moral cultivation (geren xiuyang) and moral pledges made among friends should not be confused with the New Life Movement,” because those approaches to moral reform were too complicated for common people to follow and tended to degenerate into empty words. In short, Chiang believed that the goal of renewed life, which was the minimal requirement for all people, should be achieved not through a moral obligation of self-cultivation and peer pressure among friends but through a state-sponsored project, such as the New Life Movement, which would guarantee universal adherence to the new norms for everyday conduct.

Thus, despite Wang’s criticism, Chiang Kai-shek still relied on police power as the major measure to ensure compliance with New Life directives. On April 20, 1934, Chiang sent an order to Gu Zhenglun, the commander of the military police in Nanjing; Chen Zhuo, the chief of police in Nanjing; and Wu Tiecheng, the mayor of Shanghai. In it, Chiang demanded that civil servants, civil and military police, and the army play a pivotal role in the New Life Movement by “urging society and influencing the masses” to achieve orderliness and cleanliness in public spaces, such as stations, wharves, theaters, restaurants, teahouses, and parks. He instructed them to convey his order to their subordinates and to implement the order first in the bureaucratic and military systems. He required that “officials in charge should urge implementation [of the order] in person and every day and every week should routinely carry out inspections of actual practices, so that the New Life Movement will not end without results” (Chiang 1934b). Chiang also had this order sent to all provincial governors and major military leaders to have them promote the New Life Movement accordingly.⁸ Most of the provincial governors replied positively, and the movement gained considerable momentum throughout the country.

Chiang Kai-shek further centralized the organization of the New Life Movement and integrated it into government routine in order to channel state power to endorse this movement. The Outline of the New Life Movement (Xinshenghuo yundong gangyao), the official guideline for the implementation of the movement approved by Chiang and published under his name on May 15, 1934, stipulated that the New Life Movement all over the country should follow orders from the central New Life Movement Promotion Association in Nanchang, and that all provincial, municipal, and county associations should take the form of executive committees (ganshi zhi) composed of the highest party, administrative, and military officials at the corresponding bureaucratic levels. Local associations were to supervise implementation of the movement by social organizations, while heads of social organizations were responsible for promoting the movement among their respective social groups (Minguo ershisan 1935, 131–132). This organizational structure ensured that the entire New Life Movement was under the direct leadership of government officials at all hierarchical levels, carried out as a state-sponsored project among the routine obligations of the government.⁹

On July 1, 1934, the central New Life Movement Promotion Association was officially established in Nanchang, in accordance with the Outline of the New Life Movement, with Chiang Kai-shek as its chairman. Provincial governors, military leaders, and higher officials of the Nationalist government were appointed as directors (zhidaoyuan) to supervise the efficient implementation of the movement at the local level (Minguo ershisan 1935, 139). Chiang immediately ordered all existing local associations to stop using the form of voluntary societies, which most had been until then,¹⁰ and to reorganize themselves into executive committees (Minguo ershisan 1935, 146–148). This reorganization represented an essential change in the nature of the New Life Movement. Local associations in the form of voluntary societies invited people who were willing to follow the directives of the New Life Movement to join and charged them a small membership fee to fund the associations. This approach implied that local officials who chose this organizational form, including Wang Jingwei, understood the New Life Movement as a moral movement appealing for voluntary self-discipline. However, Chiang insisted that the New Life Movement should be practiced by everyone, not only by members of the associations, so he required local officials to take charge of the movement to ensure its universal scope. He even promised that the reorganized associations could depend on government agents and semi-official social groups for cadres and could rely on the government for funding, so that the associations would no longer need to take the form of voluntary societies to acquire the necessary personnel and financial resources (Minguo ershisan 1935, 154–155).¹¹ Thus, the New Life Movement discarded the localized model of moral reform based on self-discipline and became a top-down statist project aimed at disciplining others.

Probably due to Wang Jingwei’s challenge, however, Chiang insisted in the public documents of the New Life Movement that people’s conduct should be corrected through persuasion, not coercion (Minguo ershisan 1935, 133). Moreover, other social groups, in addition to government agents, were recruited to implement the New Life Movement. Immediately after the reorganization, the newly established central association instructed local associations to organize Youth Spare Time Service Corps (Qingnian jiaqi fuwu tuan), which consisted of cadres selected from students, store attendants, civil servants, educated women, and freelancers; they were deployed to educate the common people about the New Life directives.¹² The central association explicitly claimed: “The coercive power, or political power, of the military police and the Public Security Bureau [the civil police] should cooperate with the persuasive power, or educational power, of the Service Corps under the supervision of the central New Life Movement Promotion Association” (Minguo ershisan 1935, 191–194). Nevertheless, persuasion in Chiang’s approach was subtly different from Wang’s understanding of moral reform. Wang Jingwei considered persuasion a spontaneous mechanism of moral regulation among equal people without rigid organization, while Chiang Kai-shek intended to use persuasion as a soft method to enforce discipline among the people within a hierarchical framework of power relationships.

After the first year of the New Life Movement, Chiang was satisfied enough with the progress toward orderliness and cleanliness that he expanded the movement’s agenda to include the “three transformations” (san hua) of life—namely, militarizing life (junshi hua) and making it productive (shengchan hua) and aesthetic (yishu hua). Thus, the movement developed from hygienic and behavioral reform to an overall reform of life in order to mold people into ideal citizens of the nation. The central association formulated more detailed and extensive directives on people’s daily behavior to achieve the three transformations.¹³ To ensure the effective implementation of these directives, the central association ordered officials in charge of all government institutions to organize their subordinates into Labor Service Corps (Laodong fuwu tuan) within their institutions to serve society for at least one hour in their spare time (Minguo ershisi 1936, 260–261). The training of the Labor Service Corps was highly militarized and emphasized patriotism, obedience, and altruism (Minguo ershisi 1936, 419–420). Chiang Kaishek even added work in the New Life Movement as a new criterion in the routine evaluation of government employees (Minguo ershisi 1936, 256–257).

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault summarizes three instruments of discipline—hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination—all of which can be observed in the New Life Movement (Foucault 1979, 170–194). However, the expansive agenda of the three transformations in the second stage of the New Life Movement not only intended to train “docile bodies” but also tried to reform popular morality, manners, values, customs, and even aesthetic tastes. Yet it proved difficult to change people’s inner minds through external discipline, even through the Labor Service Corps. Consequently, the New Life Movement did not achieve satisfactory results in its second year; even worse, the first year’s progress in orderliness and cleanliness faded (Minguo ershisi 1936, 815–822). Thus, although the New Life Movement in China was quite similar to disciplinary projects in the West, it was still different from the Western model of discipline and should be examined within the contemporary Chinese discursive framework.

Articulating the Moral and Legal Responsibilities of the Modern Chinese State

In premodern China, how the state should maintain social order was often discussed in controversies between Confucianism and Legalism, also called the “debate between ritual and law” (li fa zhi zheng). Confucianism and Legalism shared a common goal of maintaining the patriarchal social order; they differed in the methods they chose to achieve this goal: Confucianism advocated education and moral suasion to transform people’s inner minds (jiaohua), while Legalism relied on punishment to control people’s external behavior (xingfa) (Wang Boqi [1956] 2004, 10–25; Dirlik 1975, 968–969). These two aspects of social control complemented each other and together maintained the imperial system of rule based on the Confucian ideology of an ideal society, which valued the morality of benevolence (ren) and followed a rigid hierarchical patriarchal order.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enlightened Chinese intellectuals such as Yan Fu began criticizing the traditional legal system that was embedded in China’s hierarchical social order and reliant on the benevolent virtue of rulers. These intellectuals hailed “the impersonality and universality of Western law,” which they identified as one of the reasons for the wealth and power of Western countries (Schwartz 1964, 147–154). When the Qing government ordered a revision of laws and planned in 1903 for legal reform following the Western model, reformists who supported the rule of law debated those who advocated preservation of the traditional moral core in lawmaking. The reformists intended to use the Western principle of the rule of law to introduce and guarantee a new set of social norms that linked individual citizens directly to the nation-state without the restriction of patriarchal bonds, so they challenged traditional social norms and tried to confine the moral role of the Chinese state to the separate domain of morality based on rituals and customs rather than law (Liang Zhiping 2013).

However, reformists were also concerned about whether Western law was appropriate for Chinese society and how law decoupled from its traditional moral core could effectively maintain social order. A typical example of these themes is an article by Kang Youwei’s student Mai Menghua in the journal New Citizens (Xinmin congbao), which discusses the relationship between law and morality. Mai thought that law maintained social order by regulating behavior from the outside and by preventing people from doing evil things, but the power of law had to be restricted to guarantee individuals’ freedom and rights. In contrast, morality controlled people’s inner thoughts and demanded good behavior. Mai argued that law alone was insufficient to maintain social order and that China should not transplant Western law directly without considering the Chinese moral condition. He claimed, “People must be moral enough to place public interest first, and then they will abide by law; when people are willing to abide by law, then law can be effectively observed” (Tuian [Mai Menghua] 1903, 61). Here, the morality Mai talked about was subtly different from traditional morality, with its benevolence, filial piety, chastity, and loyalty—virtues cherished in the patriarchal social order. He intended to cultivate a new morality that served the public good and promoted obedience to law so as to lay the foundation for the rule of law. He was worried that a Westernized legal system detached from its indigenous social norms lacked enough authority by itself to maintain social order effectively.

Mai’s worries proved to be quite reasonable. In the early Republican period, the Beiyang government promulgated many new laws and tried to establish a Western-style legal system, but the rule of law was not successfully achieved in the chaotic warlord period. After the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement in 1919, traditional morality based on the patriarchal social order was significantly devalued, but the new legal system was still not effective enough to foster new social norms in the 1920s. In 1923, Zhou Gengsheng, a famous juridical scholar educated in Japan, Britain, and France, published a book for lay readers to introduce basic knowledge of law.¹⁴ In this popular book, he reiterated the concern about the rule of law and the relationship between law and morality. He regarded both law and morality as methods to control people’s conduct in social life, but he felt that this control operated in different ways: law was derived from state power, so it was coercive and only valid within the boundaries of a particular state; in contrast, morality was universal but not coercive, which implied that the state could not monopolize the power of morality. He thought law regulated people’s external conduct, while morality regulated people’s internal minds; but he disagreed that morality was the foundation of law, because sometimes law had nothing to do with morality. Like legal reformists in the late Qing period, Zhou demarcated law and morality in different domains. However, he highlighted the role that morality should play in the rule of law and claimed that morality not only helped effectively enforce law but also complemented the rule of law by regulating people’s conduct beyond the domain of law. For him, since the rule of law had replaced the rule of morality in maintaining the ideal social order in which individual citizens served the nation-state, morality was an instrument with which to achieve the new goal of governance, rather than the goal of governance per se, as in imperial China. Nevertheless, he did not explicitly point out how morality should be fostered, and by whom, in the new system of the rule of law (Zhou 1923).

It was against this discursive background that the New Life Movement arose. The ultimate goal of this movement was to cultivate qualified citizens for the nation, but both Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei still understood this new task of the state within the traditional discourse of the rule of morality. Chiang believed that the state should be responsible for national morality and that morality could be achieved through efforts to discipline people’s daily conduct, while Wang thought that social elites should nurture people’s morality without the intervention of state power. Chiang intended to restore seemingly indigenous and traditional moral doctrines, but the detailed directives of the New Life Movement revealed that he inserted new political meaning into old moral terms (Dirlik 1975). Wang Jingwei also advocated public morality (gongde) to boost individuals’ sense of citizenship and awareness of the collective good for the sake of the nation (Wang Zhaoming 1934c, 12–13). Thus, their disagreement was not whether or not the New Life Movement was a moral reform or what kind of morality should be advocated, but rather whether or not this reform should be implemented by the state and, if so, how the state should implement it to maintain a new social order for the modern nation-state. On this question, contemporary commentators also contributed their opinions.

Chang Lit-sen (or Zhang Yuanruo), a political scientist, praised the New Life Movement, for he thought it would establish a necessary moral foundation for the effective rule of law. He believed that the Chinese people lacked both the concept of and experience with the rule of law, because they had relied on the rule of ritual (lizhi) to maintain social norms in imperial times. Given that the power of ritual was lost in modern China, he pointed out, “enforcing laws, advocating laws, observing laws, and publicizing laws” in these chaotic social conditions were more important and more difficult than simply making laws (Chang 1935, 63–64). Chang shared the concern of Mai Menghua and Zhou Gengsheng that imported law would not be properly obeyed due to the lack of correlated social norms. He appealed for “the true spirit of the Chinese indigenous rule of ritual” to lay the foundation for the rule of law in the future. He believed that the New Life Movement could achieve this “true spirit” by disciplining people’s conduct according to new social norms (Chang 1935, 74).

In his speech “New Life and Law” at the Central Broadcasting Service in May 1934, Gui Yu, a law expert, claimed that the New Life Movement was more effective than law in maintaining social order because the directives of the New Life Movement included more detailed content than enacted laws. “Since law tends to function passively and lacks positive methods to guarantee its effect,” Gui argued, if the New Life Movement could “mobilize the whole population to abolish bad habits and renew lives,” then it would complement the rule of law (Gui 1934b, 2). There was a subtle but essential twist in Gui Yu’s speech: the New Life Movement was not a movement promoting the abstract spirit of indigenous ritual or morality, but an aggregation of concrete directives regulating people’s habits and daily behavior.

Shi Feng also doubted that law per se could effectively maintain the social order in China. In his article “Morality, Law, and the New Life Movement,” he criticized several contemporary understandings of the relationship between law and morality, especially the legalist idea that law could regulate all human conduct. This idea, he argued, would lead to the abuse of legislation: “Making a law that cannot be enforced will damage this particular law, undermine the overall authority of all laws, and eventually hinder the rule of law” (Shi 1934, 9–10). Unlike Chang, he believed the foundation of the rule of law was more than just morality. He thought that moral norms, technical norms, and norms of custom were different types of primary regulations and that the state selected some of these primary regulations to make laws and enforced them with state power. Therefore, morality and law overlapped; they regulated human conduct at different levels. From this basic understanding of law and morality, he concluded, on the one hand, that the New Life Movement as a form of “the rule of morality” (dezhi) set the foundation for the rule of law; on the other hand, the rule of morality also needed to rely on state power and legal methods, such as policing, for enforcement (Shi 1934, 15).

Chang, Gui, and Shi were all concerned that the rule of law could not effectively maintain social order in modern China. Chang thought overall conditions in China were not conducive to the rule of law. Gui felt the passive nature of the legal system limited its influence on society. Shi thought the problem was that law expanded into areas where it was impossible to exert control. All of them more or less suggested using the traditional rule of ritual or morality, which was embodied by the New Life Movement, to complement the rule of law. However, analyzed against the backdrop of legal reform since the late Qing, “the rule of morality (or ritual)” in their comments meant more the method of moral suasion that reinforced the new social norms for a modern nation-state than the traditional social norms rooted in patriarchal ethics and political order. They also disagreed with one another slightly. Chang and Gui both assumed that the New Life Movement launched by the government would naturally take over the task of using moral power to urge people to follow everyday social norms. However, Shi proposed to use coercive state power, such as the police, to endorse moral suasion. He believed that the line between morality and law should be blurred, and that law must be socialized (shehuihua) and moralized (daodehua), so that “morality, law, and the nation-state could be integrated as a whole” (Shi 1934, 15). For Shi, the New Life Movement was not a pure moral campaign, but something combining morality and law to serve the nation-state. He recognized that the new task of the state was to discipline the population, but he still articulated this idea in the dualism of morality versus law.

In contrast, commentaries in journals that supported fascism and Chiang’s dictatorship tended to suggest that the New Life Movement should be enforced by law and coercive state power. For example, an article in Youth and War (Qingnian yu zhanzheng), a journal published in Nanchang, argued that the New Life Movement should rely on the legal system to reform social norms. It proposed three measures to implement the movement. First, the Police Regulations (Weijing fa fa) should be expanded and strictly enforced, so that those who violated the directives of the New Life Movement would be punished for violating the regulations. Second, it advocated “social inspection,” so that any witness to illegal conduct would have the right to report it to the authorities for punishment. Last, it suggested enacting a new law to improve all citizens’ health and enforcing it with coercive power (Chen Dong 1934). The weekly journal Moral Endeavor (Lizhi), produced by the Society of Moral Endeavor (Lizhi she), the alumni association of the Whampoa Military Academy, published another article to advocate using political and legal power to promote the New Life Movement among the masses. This article disagreed with the idea that the New Life Movement could use only moral suasion and that an individual’s life should be disciplined by morality only, not by law. It argued that if the government used political power to improve the material condition of people’s lives, then it was entitled to discipline the people using coercive power to ensure they fit into these new living conditions. The author claimed, “We should give up individual freedom to pursue the freedom of the nation” (Gong 1934, 3). These commentators supported using legal and administrative power to reform people’s lives and trusted that the state had enough legal authority and power to enforce the New Life Movement, which for them was primarily a campaign to discipline people’s external behavior. They tended to believe that the domain of law was so broad and unlimited that it could cover every aspect of social life.

If Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei’s dispute is set against the intellectual spectrum described here, Wang Jingwei advocated implementing the New Life Movement as a pure moral movement led by elites and opposed using state power to interfere in people’s lives without legal justification.¹⁵ In contrast, a few of Chiang’s loyal followers supported the fascist idea that the state should monopolize unlimited legal power to maintain social order. Chiang’s standpoint was somewhere in between, probably closer to Shi Feng’s opinions. Chiang agreed that it would be better to maintain social order not only through the legal system but also through the New Life Movement as a moral reform implemented through a series of concrete disciplinary directives addressing people’s daily conduct. Yet Chiang also felt that the movement still needed to be supported by state power, such as police action.

In short, most contemporary political leaders and commentators tended to agree that the state had a moral responsibility to society and recognized the New Life Movement as a continuation of the indigenous tradition of the rule of morality.¹⁶ Nevertheless, their articulation of how to implement this movement and how this movement could help maintain social order introduced a new political ideology distinct from the traditional rule of morality.

Creating the Domain of Discipline Between Law and Morality

Contemporary commentators talked about the possibility of using legal power to implement the New Life Movement, but almost no enacted law was cited to support the movement except the Police Regulations. In fact, other legislation had content related to the New Life Movement. For example, the Nuisance Removal Act (Wuwu saochu tiaoli) and Regulations (Shishi xize), drafted by the Ministry of Health and promulgated by the Nationalist government in 1928, stipulated that property owners and occupiers clean up the inside and outside of their houses and remove all garbage, dust, dirty water, and human waste and that sanitary inspectors carry out regular examinations of households to ensure compliance (Zeng 1947, 119–122). This legislation could have been used to dispute Wang Jingwei’s opposition to the indoor sanitary inspection, but these laws and regulations were never used to support the New Life Movement, nor even mentioned in the movement’s official documents. In actuality, no government agents strictly enforced or widely publicized these law and regulations, because the Ministry of Health had been understaffed ever since it was established, and, in 1931, it was downsized into a division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This example confirms as reasonable the previously discussed contemporary concern about the rule of law in China. Law per se consisted of powerless empty words without effective enforcement, so the New Life Movement did not resort to law but made its own directives to discipline the people directly.

As a campaign for behavioral and moral reform, the New Life Movement produced many directives and guidelines full of trivial details aimed at establishing norms for people’s daily lives. Many of the directives covered public etiquette, courtesies, and personal hygiene. Deng Wenyi, Chiang Kai-shek’s secretary in the Nanchang Military Headquarters, drafted the first set of fifty-four directives to achieve “orderliness” and forty directives to achieve “cleanliness” immediately after the launch of the New Life Movement in February 1934 (Minguo ershisan 1935, 110–112). In a revised version published in May 1934, these directives were bonded with moral doctrines—namely, propriety, righteousness, integrity, and conscience, and categorized into four basic aspects of life: “eating, dressing, dwelling, and walking” (shi yi zhu xing) (Minguo ershisan 1935, 136–138). As the New Life Movement progressed, more detailed guidelines were formulated. The central New Life Movement Association promulgated twenty-three sets of detailed guidelines for various businesses and public spaces in Nanchang soon after the central and local associations were reorganized in July 1934. These guidelines fell into roughly two categories: guidelines for proper behavior of individuals, such as shop assistants, workers, domestic servants, and pedestrians; and guidelines for proper management of service businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, places of entertainment, public toilets, rickshaws, tofu shops, stores, peddlers, offices of social groups, wharves, and street sweepers (Minguo ershisan 1935, 272; Jiangxi sheng 1936, 171–228). Following the example of the central association, local associations also drew up various guidelines for individuals and businesses according to their local conditions (figure 1).

In the early stages of the New Life Movement, these guidelines, both in Nanchang and in other places, focused mainly on orderliness and cleanliness. Later, their scope expanded gradually from individual lives to the urban environment, social order, and public health, far beyond the domain of individual morality. Chiang ordered civil servants, civil and military police, and students to supervise adherence of individuals and businesses to the New Life guidelines, so these regulations to some extent became mandatory norms of people’s conduct and requirements for business management, even though Chiang emphasized using persuasion rather than coercion to ensure popular compliance. But these guidelines were not laws or administrative regulations, either. As the central association put it:

In general, the requirements in these guidelines are higher than the average standard in order to show our expectation of achieving the best. Those who are restricted by their material conditions should do as well as they can. These are different from government regulations that should be observed unconditionally. (italics added for emphasis)

(Minguo ershisan 1935, 272;).

These guidelines thus fell into a gray zone between moral suasion, which appealed to people’s consciences without direct intervention into their behavior, and law enforcement, which followed legal procedures to punish those who violated laws.

The New Life Movement’s use of police power illustrates the operation of this movement in an arena transcending the demarcation between morality and law. The only laws mentioned in the official documents of the New Life Movement were the Police Regulations, a type of administrative law widely used in modern states all over the world to prevent and punish minor misdemeanors that undermined public security. When the modern Japanese police system was introduced into China by Yuan Shikai in the early 1900s, the police managed almost all aspects of social life, such as law enforcement, maintenance of order, public health, charity, political censorship, and correction of undesirable conduct (Reynolds 1993, 162–164). The establishment of the police system in China embodied the efforts of the modern state to penetrate, regulate, and obtain knowledge about society directly.

Figure 1.

Posters showing the guidelines for the New Life Movement.

Source: Wenhua [The cultural arts review] (1934, 15).

The Police Regulations of the 1930s overlapped considerably with the directives of the New Life Movement.¹⁷ The section of the Police Regulations on “disturbing public order” stipulated that people who behaved annoyingly in public—by, for example, shouting in streets and public spaces, quarrelling loudly in public, and making noise at night—be punished by detention for less than five days or by fines of less than five dollars, if they did not cease such behavior immediately (Qiu 1935, 28). The section on offending public decency was designed to protect good social customs, so police were charged with repressing behavior such as cursing and gambling in public, nakedness or improper dress, performing obscene songs or dramas, and insulting others with humiliating words or actions, and transgressors were to be punished if they did not stop the prohibited conduct immediately (Qiu 1935, 40). All of the misdemeanors mentioned were also banned in the New Life Movement under the rubric of “orderliness.” Some of the New Life directives related to “cleanliness” can be found in the section of the Police Regulations covering public health offenses—for example, the prohibition against relieving oneself in the street or in public spaces and the requirement that fresh food for sale should be covered and kept in clean conditions (Qiu 1935, 44).

The New Life Movement disciplined people’s conduct more strictly than the Police Regulations, as it covered minute aspects of daily behavior, such as walking on the left side of the street, lining up in crowded situations, buttoning up clothes completely, and practicing environmental and personal hygiene. Chiang Kai-shek regarded policemen as “people’s teachers and nannies” and required them to enforce the New Life directives and to ensure that people kept their homes and public spaces orderly and clean (Minguo ershisi 1936, 291–292). On the one hand, individual policemen were required to practice the New Life directives themselves within the rigid hierarchical police system; on the other hand, the New Life Movement expanded police jurisdiction and increased police responsibilities to include disciplining people for trivial transgressions of daily conduct. Thus, policemen were supposed to shoulder the dual tasks of disciplining themselves and others in the New Life Movement.

The Shanghai police’s implementation of the New Life Movement was an illustrative case. Since the New Life Movement achieved better results due to the active participation of the police in Nanchang, Wuhan, and some other inland cities,¹⁸ the Shanghai Public Security Bureau created its own New Life Movement branch in April 1935 in order to promote the movement in Shanghai (Shanghai shi gong’anju 1936, 1). This new branch took charge of the implementation of the movement and reported directly to the chief of police in Shanghai. It had two tasks: first, training, examining, and evaluating all policemen to ensure they followed the directives and moral education of the New Life Movement; second, assigning policemen the additional responsibilities of implementing the New Life Movement among the ordinary people. These responsibilities included “training the masses, cleaning up the urban environment, correcting pedestrians’ incorrect conduct, promoting hygienic campaigns, propagandizing the New Life Movement in various public spaces, and correcting all conduct of Shanghai residents not conforming to the requirements of the New Life” (Shanghai shi gong’anju 1936, 2). In implementing the New Life Movement, policemen did not simply expand their original duties, but first had to transform themselves and take on another identity. Qualified policemen were selected from the regular police force to form special groups called Persuasive Teams (Quandao dui) to promote the New Life Movement. As the name of the teams suggested, they were expected to use persuasive power to instruct people to follow the New Life directives (Shanghai shi gong’anju 1936, 3–4).

However, using Persuasive Teams for the New Life Movement did not indicate a prohibition on coercive police power. The guideline for Persuasive Teams stipulated that “those members of the public who fail to abide by New Life directives after several attempts at persuasion can be punished according to the Police Regulations” (Shanghai shi gong’anju 1936, 10). The Shanghai Public Security Bureau also explicitly announced that policemen should strictly enforce the rule against public urination and defecation, a rule that had hardly been observed as part of the Police Regulations, and punish violators accordingly in order to implement the New Life Movement (“Shanghai shi gong’anju tuixing xinshenghuo yundong banfa” 1935, 145). In these two situations, coercive policing power was not deployed unconditionally, but was carefully tailored to fit the existing Police Regulations.

After the Shanghai police had implemented the New Life Movement for a few months, the city’s Public Security Bureau asked its thirty-five local branches to report the results. Ten branches reported no difficulties, while the rest reported all kinds of problems: insufficient facilities for environmental hygiene, too few street sweepers, poor road conditions, poor people living in shabby shelters, uneducated residents, and unwillingness to accept persuasion along with repeated wrongful conduct even after correction and punishment (Shanghai shi gong’anju 1936, 14–22). Grassroots feedback from the police indicated that even the combination of coercion and persuasion was sometimes not enough to effectively implement the New Life Movement. The success of efforts to discipline the population also depended on suitable environmental and mass living conditions.

Besides policemen, students were another major force to educate people about and investigate compliance with the New Life directives. However, students had no state-endorsed power to enforce adherence to the new norms, so their efforts were often in vain (Wen 2006, 164–182). Moreover, although students were more educated and more motivated about the New Life Movement as a civilizing project, they were less amenable to state control. Their understanding of the New Life Movement was more diversified than that of the policemen and some of them even opposed the movement’s agenda (Culp 2006, 543). Consequently, students’ moral persuasive power was insufficient to discipline the people and they often played a purely pedagogical role in the New Life Movement. In Nanjing, for example, the Labor Service Corps in various institutions had many different tasks: middle school students taught people how to read and instructed them on good behavior in the streets; civil policemen corrected people’s conduct in the streets and helped keep streets clean; military police kept stations, wharves, and theaters in order; and military school students helped build roads, plant trees, and construct dams (Shoudu xinshenghuo yundong gaikuang 1935, 30). In this arrangement, students’ educational power and police disciplinary power were subtly divided to shoulder different responsibilities. Intriguingly, military men were kept at a distance from ordinary people’s daily lives, though they had even more coercive power. It implies that those in charge of the New Life Movement in Nanjing consciously removed the military from direct contact with the people in order to avoid criticism of the New Life Movement as a fascist campaign.

In short, relying mainly on police power, the New Life Movement created a new domain of discipline between morality and law. As Frederic Wakeman argues in Policing Shanghai, the Shanghai police force was given “quasi-independent judicial authority” to regulate social mores so as to realize the social ideal of this revolutionary government in the Nanjing decade (1995, 92). In this police system, Wakeman points out, enforcement of law and maintenance of order, “two related but quite separate sets of goals of modern police forces” in the West, became “integral parts of a unified system of social control” (1995, 78). In the New Life Movement, it was the duty to maintain order, rather than the duty to enforce laws, that expanded. Since the New Life directives had a much broader scope than current laws and regulations, including both personal and business norms of everyday life, the responsibility of the police to maintain public order thus expanded into a domain that was not legitimized by enacted legislation. In order to shoulder their expanded duties in the New Life Movement, policemen were required to use moral suasion to complement their coercive power, as was illustrated by the creation of Persuasive Teams in the Shanghai police. When deploying police power, the New Life Movement also needed to remain within the routine power structure of the state: the subtle line between moral suasion and coercive enforcement was blurred but still observed, as is shown in the division of responsibilities among various Labor Service Corps in Nanjing.

Conclusion

In 1924, Sun Yat-sen designed a three-phrase plan for state building in China: first, a military regime to centralize state power; second, a tutelary government to prepare citizens for constitutionalism; and finally, a constitutional state. When Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement, he regarded it as a responsibility of the tutelary government to educate people about morality, to cultivate good daily habits among them, and to discipline them to follow orders, so he used state power directly to implement the movement. Not realizing that the New Life Movement had entered a new territory for the state—disciplining the population—he still relied on the old political discourse to describe this as a moral movement. Wang Jingwei challenged Chiang’s use of state agents and their coercive power to launch this “moral” movement and interfere in people’s private lives. Based on the principle of the rule of law, he regarded this as an illegal abuse of state power. He preferred using the moral influence of social elites to transform society and limited the New Life Movement to the domain of public lives, so that the movement would become a real “moral” campaign fitting within the traditional rule of morality.

To some extent, Chiang Kai-shek accepted Wang Jingwei’s suggestion and demanded that moral persuasion be used to implement the New Life Movement. However, he also reorganized the whole system of New Life Movement Promotion Associations, both at the central level in Nanchang and at the local level all over the country, in order to integrate the movement into government routine and ensure the leadership of government officials. In design, the New Life Movement was a state-controlled apparatus of discipline: bureaucratic government institutions were its organizational foundation, examination and moral suasion were the methods by which it was implemented, and correcting people’s everyday conduct for the sake of the nation was its target.

Thus, the New Life Movement established a hierarchical disciplinary system within government institutions, with Chiang Kai-shek as its moral core, urging the higher officials of government, party, and the military, who in turn supervised their subordinates to follow the directives of the New Life Movement. Students and representatives of social groups were also trained and organized to participate in the movement by the central and local New Life Movement Associations. Then, disciplined subordinates at the bottom of the state apparatus, such as policemen, and those on the periphery of state power, such as students, were required to “serve” society by instructing people how to live in accordance with New Life directives. Through this hierarchical system, Chiang intended to create a state-controlled mechanism of discipline to shape the Chinese people into qualified citizens for the purpose of national revival.

As Arif Dirlik has pointed out, the New Life Movement embodied a new political ideology. It mixed Confucianism, which identified the political ideal as a good society based on the moral improvement of individuals, and Legalism, which placed the highest value on the state and envisioned an ideal society as an efficient machine serving the state (Dirlik 1975, 968). However, this hybrid ideology was more a contingent result of negotiation and implementation than an intentional design. Wang Jingwei’s challenge to Chiang’s original design of the New Life Movement urged Chiang to place more emphasis on moral suasion. Their discussion about how to implement the movement, and contemporary comments on the relationship of morality and law in the movement, also tended to conceptualize the New Life Movement as the necessary preparation for the transition from the rule of morality to the rule of law. Positioned in a new domain of state power between morality and law, the New Life Movement thus led neither to a fascist state with unlimited and absolute legal power, comprehensively supervising and controlling people’s lives, nor to a pure moral reform relying on the elite’s self-discipline and conscience.

As scholars have pointed out, this new domain of discipline between morality and law had much in common with the mechanism of discipline articulated in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, but it still differed from Foucault’s analysis of discipline, which was based on the Western experience. On the one hand, Foucault understood discipline as “a set of physico-political techniques,” instead of “the humble, but concrete form of every morality” (Foucault 1979, 223). Nevertheless, influenced by the Chinese tradition of the rule of morality, both Chiang Kai-shek and his contemporaries presented the New Life Movement as a moral reform. Coercive state power, exemplified by the police, was deployed in the guise of moral persuasion and service to society. On the other hand, Foucault criticized discipline as “a sort of counter-law… introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities,” because he compared it with the universal juridicism of the modern Western principle of the rule of law (Foucault 1979, 223). In contrast, China in the 1930s had not established an effective legal system, let alone “universal juridicism.” The asymmetries in the disciplinary relationship embodied in the New Life Movement were derived from the legacy of imperial China’s hierarchical political and social order, rather than from the carefully designed techniques and disciplinary apparatus of the Western experience. Therefore, the New Life Movement was not a reincarnation of a Western disciplinary project in China, but rather an organic part of China’s own modernizing process, in which the state redefined its moral and legal role in people’s everyday lives in order to build a strong nation-state.