Brian Tsui's book is part of a new wave of histories about Republican period politics that depart from the earlier narratives of Lloyd Eastman, Frederic Wakeman and others who emphasized deadly self-defeating rivalries between the cliques that surrounded Chiang Kai-shek. Tsui takes Kuomintang or Nationalist propaganda seriously, analysing the words and thoughts of a selection of interlocutors as representative of major developments in the intellectual and cultural history of the period.
In a way the book runs parallel with Maggie Clifford's Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925–1937 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). The latter is focused on the fascist qualities of the rival CC (Central Club) and Blue Shirt cliques as they competed in the forging of a vision for a unified China under Chiang Kai-shek. Violence as a means to fascist ends in Republican China is emphasized. Tsui approaches the subject exclusively at the level of ideas and ideology per se, without much attention to the larger political picture. He puts ideologues like Dai Jitao in the context of Pan-Asianism emanating from Japan and India. The other emphasis is on the changing and contentious cultural aesthetics of Chinese political discourse in the mid-20th century.
After an impressive theoretical and historiographical review of relevant literature in chapter one, Tsui turns to the importance ideologically of the 1927 April Coup led by Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists. He sees this event as the catalyst for a conservative spiritual revolution that swept over China for the next three decades. In chapter two, Tsui introduces the central figure of the book, Dai Jitao. It was Dai Jitao's response intellectually to the 1927 Coup that established him as the doyen of Sun Yat-sen thought. The book is certainly the most thorough and nuanced treatment of Dai Jitao yet to appear in English.
Chapter three moves to a discussion of how Dai's ideas about the Three Principles of the People – the concept of minsheng (people's livelihood) in particular – were introduced to the masses in the 1930s by means of a conservative revolutionary youth movement. In his examination of Dai's promotion of boy scout associations, Tsui breaks new ground. A careful dissection of the boy scout movement demonstrates its importance as a mass mobilizing tool. Chapter four covers the wartime (1937–1945) escalation of rhetoric and the invocation of spiritual patriotic unity for the “total war” needs of the state. It is at this point that the concept of “vitalism” is introduced as coined in the words and actions of the minister of education, Chen Lifu, who led the CC.
Chapter five tackles the complicated subject of the projection of cultural aestheticism in the service of muscular nationalism throughout the 1927–1949 period. The vehicle here is the writings of the famous aesthetician Zhu Guangqian. The last chapter (six) connects the conservative revolution supporting Chiang Kai-shek ideologically with the spiritual Pan-Asianism that Tagore espoused on tours of China in the 1920s. The Chinese apostle of Tagorean Pan Asianism in the 1930s and 1940s was the peripatetic Tan Yunshan. Tan lived for years in India teaching at the Cheena-Bhavana just outside Calcutta and commuting back and forth to China.
As intellectual biography, Tsui brings to life Dai Jitao, Chen Lifu, Zhu Guangqian, Tan Yunshan, Fu Sinian, Jiang Dingfu, Li Shizeng and Pan Gongzhan as architects of the conservative revolution. The book is narrowly focused on their ideological development. The Blue Shirts are seen as unimportant ideologically, and the few references to fascism are about Italy and Germany and how China was different. On the other hand, the influence on Chinese ideologues of European thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Alfred De Grazia, Benedetto Croce, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Theodor Adorno and others is acknowledged. Throughout, Tsui takes revisionist stands, challenging the older intepretations of Eastman, Wakeman, John Fitzgerald and Huang Jianli as too dismissive of Nationalist political thought and the effectiveness of the ideological and mass campaigns Dai Jitao and others spearheaded. The anti-communist violence that the conservative revolution rhetoric welcomed is hardly mentioned. In the end Dai could not countenance Mao's rise to power; he committed suicide in 1949.
In the Epilogue, Tsui brings the story of Dai's conservative revolution to Taiwan after 1949, where it burned strong as long as Chiang Kai-shek was alive. Tsui ends the book a bit strangely with ad hominem condemnations of President Trump. Perhaps the connection is fascism but that is not made explicit. In short, Tsui has written a deeply researched and highly original re-interpretation of political thought during the Chiang Kai-shek era.
