The rise of Chinese communism has dominated most accounts of the 20th century in China. Until recently, there has been relatively little consideration of Chinese fascism during the same period, largely because unlike Italy and Germany, China is not considered to have been a country greatly affected by fascist thought. Although the late Frederic Wakeman published an influential article in this journal on “Confucian fascism” some two decades ago, he was ultimately ambivalent about the solidity of fascism in the thinking of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Thus, Maggie Clinton's impressively researched and thoughtfully argued monograph Revolutionary Nativism reopens important arguments on the impact of fascism in the Nanjing decade (1928–1937). Clinton argues that two powerful groupings within the ruling Nationalist party, the CC Clique and the “Blue Shirts” group, were indisputably fascist, and had serious influence on the formation of the Nationalist party agenda. Her work is based on a close reading of sources such as little-known journals, including Qiantu (Future) and Saodangbao (Mopping Up Pictorial), and shows that there was a body of thinkers with its own distinctive fascist–corporatist view of Chinese development. In particular, fascist thinkers proposed the idea of a reimagined Confucianism. Logically, this seemed strange; after all, Confucianism is based both on a reverence for the past and an innate belief in the importance of humane feeling, neither of which are obviously fascist attributes. Yet, as Clinton shows, there were many aspects of the discourse of the Chinese fascists that resonated strongly with fascism elsewhere; the joy of killing communists (p. 112), a task for which normal Confucian restraint was held not to apply, and an obsession with militarization of society, in a way that the Confucian–Mencian tradition certainly did not support. One Chinese fascist thinker, Ru Chunpu, argued that China should be organized “in a spirit of war” (p. 135), and that sentiment clearly ran through the self-declared fascists. There was also a strongly misogynistic element in their discourse, with sexual licence being associated with a kind of radicalism which had to be expelled from society. One particularly notable element of Clinton's study is her analysis of Chinese fascist style. The journals she examines reflected modernity in a series of clean lines, tanned bodies, and futuristic fonts that would have had Marinetti nodding in approval. Clinton provides detailed and insightful analyses of the aesthetics of Chinese fascism, making a clear and convincing case for it as a subset of the visual imaginary of Chinese modernity as a whole.

Clinton does not argue that we should think of the Nationalists as a fascist regime, but suggests that fascism was one element that “animated the very center of Chinese party politics during this period” (p. 196), a measured conclusion that adds nuance to our understanding of that very odd mixture of ideologies that was the Nationalist party. Historians will draw on Clinton's findings to ask how important fascism really was as a factor in the shaping of modern China. Of course, fascism is one of the slipperiest terms in the vocabulary of ideology. However, in the discourse that Clinton identifies, one element which characterizes most “classic” fascisms seems absent: an obsession with the irrational and primordial. A hatred of the bourgeois and the rational-bureaucratic underpinned important aspects of both Italian and German fascist thinking (as in, for instance, Carl Schmitt's critique of law). In important respects, it appears that the Chinese fascists failed to have the courage of their supposed convictions, veering toward a more recognizable conservatism, as Brian Tsui discusses in his book China's Conservative Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In some ways, this seems less like Germany than Spain, which was dominated by an authoritarian conservative (Franco), but whose regime also contained a genuinely fascist element (the Falange); Chiang himself seems to reflect the former much more (indeed, Chiang wrote of his sympathy for Franco in a diary entry of 1937). This gives the reader some pause for thought at conclusions such as the idea that fascist Confucianism could mean “the cataclysmic murder of entire populations” in the service of a misguided idea of efficiency (p. 147). It could have done; but since the trajectory of Chinese politics moved in a different (albeit distinctly bloody) direction, it is hard to know whether this would have been likely. Likewise, the claim that the regime was preparing “the average citizen for war” (p. 158) is convincing; but one of the important conflicts for which China was preparing was a defensive war against Japan, very different from the classic expansionist fascism of Germany, Italy or (if fascism is the right term there), Japan itself.

These questions suggest that Maggie Clinton has opened up an important new strand in our understanding of the political and intellectual history of 20th-century China. Revolutionary Nativism is a powerful book that will shape debates for years to come.