In the 1920s and 1930s, fascism raised its head around the world, including China. Here fascist organizations such as the Blue Shirts and the CC Clique, reaching a membership in the hundreds of thousands, sought to revolutionize the country from the right, championing values of hierarchy, discipline, and national unity. Albeit never seizing power, in their own names, as their counterparts in Germany and Italy, these organizations were integrated into the Guomindang and thus must be taken seriously, Maggie Clinton argues, because of both what fascism meant for China and what the experience of China means for the history of fascism.

Revolutionary Nativism re-examines fascism in China in a global key. Clinton's starting point is that the Blue Shirts and the CC Clique were profoundly modern. That they couched their ideas in a Confucian language should not lead us into thinking that they were mere conservatives seeking to uphold traditional social structures. Through a sharp reading of the Chinese fascist cultural production, Clinton demonstrates that the Blue Shirts and the CC Clique appropriated Confucian values selectively, to align them with the modern woes of industrialization, imperialism, and nationalism. Their goal was a national regeneration that was at the same time revolutionary—in that it would release the productive energies of the Chinese nation—and counter-revolutionary, because it would cleanse China of communists, labor unions, and women's activists. As Clinton skillfully illustrates through comparative pointers, these were features of global fascism.

The book is organized into five, thematic chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the origins of the Blue Shirts and the CC Clique, showing just how hyper-modern their concerns were. For example, the vision of social harmony of He Zhonghan, the leader of the Blue Shirts, was rooted in military discipline. The national-productivist ethos of Chen Lifu, head of the CC Clique, was the modern company; he was a mining engineer trained at the University of Pittsburgh. Their modernist aesthetics, fetishism of speed and efficiency, and embrace of technologies such as radio and film were counterbalanced by nativist values derived from Confucianism, such as filial piety, elitism, and sexual probity. This powerful ideological mix authorized the fascists to turn violent toward their enemies during the White Terror. Chapter 3 illustrates the fascist “counterinsurgency” campaign, especially against communists, that led to the killing, kidnapping, and reeducation of undesirables. The New Life Movement is the subject of chapter 4. In their attempt to “fix the everyday,” fascists sought to regulate people's lives both at home and in the workplace. Through suasion and coercion, everyone was supposed to follow orders to maximize national efficiency and morality. As shown in chapter 5, literature and the arts also became tools in this project—Clinton regards them as “principal sites for the production and consolidation of new social meanings” (p. 162). Fascists used the state to suppress the literary efforts of their enemies, and often attacked cultural elites whose work jarred with their view of national literature. The writer Ding Ling, for example, was kidnapped and held for almost three years; other cultural producers were murdered.

Revolutionary Nativism is persuasive and well written, and challenges us to rethink the political culture of interwar China. While focusing on the Blue Shirts and the CC Clique, it has implications that go beyond these two groups. Of particular interest is the ever-present shadow of Chiang Kai-shek, the nominal head of the Blue Shirts, who unleashed fascist terror against the communists while also adopting their language in his official rhetoric. The twinning of Confucianism with state-led industrialization, instituted by Chiang and his fascists, resurfaced in a different register after World War II, for example in the discourse on Asian values in the 1980s.

Revolutionary Nativism is a must-read not only for scholars of Chinese history, but also for those wanting to understand the workings of fascism in a transnational perspective. In this sense, the book is in dialogue with other recent studies of fascism in Asia and elsewhere. This growing literature moves away from static and Eurocentric models of fascism, stressing instead, as does Clinton, the diffuse and fluid production of fascism. Chinese fascists frequently commented (favorably) on Mussolini and Hitler, but their fascism was by-and-large homemade, arising from concerns that were global and solutions that rang local. The case of Chinese fascism is of theoretical importance because of the role of imperialism. In recent years, scholars of Italian, German, and Japanese fascism have emphasized the relationship between their imperialism and fascism in aspects such as racism, bloc economies, and radicalization of the regime. China, however, was fighting imperialism. Was there such a thing as anti-imperialist fascism in China, and perhaps in other colonial settings? Clinton's account focuses on nationalism, and should therefore not be faulted for not dealing with imperialism in a more extensive way. But it is testament to the quality and theoretical sophistication of her study that such questions are raised.