This book offers a fascinating and intriguing history of fascism in 1920s and 1930s Republican China. Going far beyond earlier studies on fascist ideology (Maria Hsia Chang, William Kirby, James Gregor, Dooeum Chang, Deng Yuanzhong), this publication is less concerned with the intellectual history of fascism in China than in its cultural foundations. Delving deep in a trove of sources ranging from political writings to popular journals, Clinton presents fascism as a form of Chinese nativism that falls back on distinct Confucian values, a turn that started with Sun Yat-sen's growing fascination with Confucianism one year before his death in 1925. Thanks to the powerful intervention of Dai Jitao afterwards, she argues, Chinese revolution became an indigenous enterprise that intended to leave behind capitalism and communism. For Dai, only human moral striving could assure the implementation of Sun's Three Principles of the People (Sanminzhuyi). According to Clinton's findings, the ideal of creating a “harmonious form of industrial modernity” fascinated political actors and literati of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Promising to avoid the degeneration of Western modernity that had become most visible in metropolitan democracies after World War I, it brought forth the creation of nationalist literature and arts (minzu wenyi) that fought against both liberal and socialist or communist ideas and tried to establish an alternative political ideology.

Arguing that it is imperative to take the Blue Shirts’ and CC Cliques’ self-uttered concern to revolutionize culture seriously in order to understand how fascists could claim to reset history's clock while honoring timeless national traditions, the author offers profound insights into the rise of fascist culture as the source of revolutionary power in the years after the high tide of the May Fourth movement. Unlike the socialists’ interpretation, culture has to be enforced by guidance, drill and control, best managed by the state in a strictly tailored fashion. It is thus not surprising that Chinese fascists consciously made use of vernacular journals, pictorial magazines, radio and film to raise political consciousness and to enhance national cohesion. According to the members of both cliques, these aims could only be achieved on the basis of China's cultural tradition and values while simultaneously attacking both communism and liberalism, the primary political opposition forces identified by the KMT at that time.

When the philosopher Zhang Junmai explained in 1936 in Ruijin – after the downfall of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi – that Marxism was incompatible with Chinese society, he described the remaining areas under Communist control as infested with inhumanity. In his view, the Communists rejected both Sun's model of industrial development and the Confucian values of social order, family and sexual morality, and were thus enemies of the state that had to be annihilated. Clinton shows in her analysis that fascist publications of the 1930s indeed equated Communists with beasts instead of human beings. As argued elsewhere such a view can be traced back as early as the Taiping's discourse on demons and can thus be deemed an important part of Chinese culture.Footnote ¹ Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the author sees fascist violence as closely interlinked with nativism (as it is today in a number of democratic states in Europe and North America). She proves convincingly that nativism is never simply a return to a warm and cozy past, but always violent, and sometimes even excessively so.

It goes without saying that fascism itself – both as ideology and as social practice – is by no means limited to the European continent (or Japan), as Stein Ugelvig Larsen once pointed out.Footnote ² Contrary to the CCP's constant claim that China had been a victim of imperialism and fascism (in the latter case most notably in 2005 when, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, China lauded herself as having been an important member of the anti-fascist allied forces), this work shows how fascist ideas were politically prominent in China also. In this respect the book is a precious contribution to our understanding of the global history of fascism. However, what remains unclear in the book is whether a complex concept such as fascism can easily be applied to the Chinese case. Explaining Chinese fascism from a merely Chinese perspective, Clinton neglects to engage with the vast amount of research on European fascism. The fascinating question would be if fascism is culturally contingent, or if it is a political phenomenon that can emerge in every society. She is correct to observe that a cult figure or a party leader is largely absent in Chinese discourse (as one would expect when recalling the standard narrative of fascism), but the simultaneous emergence of fascism in Germany, Japan and Italy leads one to wonder if the focus on a nativist core that made use of symbols, commodities and practices associated with the modernist aesthetic suffices to explain it. One point warranting further discussion is if Chinese fascism – being a revolutionary reaction to the liberalism and the socialism of the May Fourth movement (both of which were European ideologies) – is exclusively a result of inner-Chinese strands of thought instead of being influenced from outside. The fact that hundreds of Chinese students in Germany – starting from Gu Hongming to Lin Yutang and Chiang Wei-kuo – personally experienced the political changes in post-World War I Europe while also reading and translating Nietzsche, Spengler, and even Hitler should be considered when analyzing the genesis of fascism in order not to mistake nativism as another discourse of self-assertion.Footnote ³

These shortcomings notwithstanding, the book provides a lucid and fascinating investigation that can be considered a solid foundation for further research, such as the question why the fascist movement remained unpopular despite its propagandistic efforts, and what role popular reactions played in this context. These questions would surely help to understand the renaissance of the discourse on strong nation and people with high moral standards after 1945, that is whether the KMT efforts on Taiwan after 1949 were a continuation of this or not. At the end of her book Clinton understands the mobilization of Confucian values as a “bedrock of alternative modernity.” Given that calls for a nativism (that is no longer necessarily revolutionary) are continued in the contemporary era in which a central political actor invests large resources in Confucius Institutes, the branding of harmony as a national and global ideal, as well as socialist core values, one might wonder whether the Communist Party's decision to tap into the nativist heritage for achieving national cohesion is coincidental or not.Footnote ⁴ This book is an important contribution not only for taking fascism in East Asia seriously, but also for making us rethink the role of state-led modernity via moralization of the everyday.