Organizer: Terry D. Bodenhorn, University of Findlay
Chair: Ernest P. Young, University of Michigan
Discussant: John Fitzgerald, La Trobe University
Guomindang (GMD) personnel have articulated and marketed various characteristics and symbols perceived as crucial to a modernizing China. Understood as constituents of modernity, tangible elements (national flags, anthems, etc.), specific institutions (welfare, education, scientific facilities), and intangible qualities (nationalism, social trust, social discipline), have all drawn the attention and advocacy of Party members. Drawing on anthropological and historical research, this panel examines GMD rhetorics and emblems of a new or "modern" China from 1925 to 1980.
Terry Bodenhorn employs literary and social theory to analyze Chen Lifu’s 1934 text, Weishenglun (Vitalism), a key document in the CC Clique’s vision of a modern China. Chen’s text presents a selective Confucian lexicon partially "rectified" to express modernist understandings of social trust, discipline, and economic productivity.
Mike Murdock ponders the ambiguities of Guomindang policy vis-à-vis Christian educational institutions in the 1920s. The GMD spurred popular agitation of anti-Christian actions while simultaneously proffering state protection to Christian organizations.
Megan Greene studies GMD efforts to use science to promote modernity or an image of a modern state. She compares statements about science made by central government figures during the Nanjing Decade and during the 1960s and 1970s on Taiwan in order to ascertain Party conceptualizations of modernity, and changes in those conceptions over time.
Beth Notar examines a more tangible aspect of statist modernity, paper money. She notes the changing attitudes of the GMD and the Communist Party toward paper money from 1935 to 1949, and ties these changing attitudes to attempts to promote trust and finance a "modern" nation.
Chen Lifu’s Vitalism: A Guomindang Vision of Modernity
Terry D. Bodenhorn, University of Findlay
In 1934 the influential Guomindang functionary and ideologue, Chen Lifu, published Weishenglun (Vitalism), an important text in the Guomindang effort to imagine a modern China during the 1930s. Guomindang ideology is typically described dismissively by Western scholars as derivative, conservative, anachronistic, and ill-suited to the needs and conditions of a modern nation. Chen Lifu’s writings, laden with Confucian terminology, are often raised as examples of the substantive ideological backwardness of the GMD. However, in contrast to Western critics of GMD ideology during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), I find in Chen Lifu’s ideology, as expressed in Weishenglun, a philosophic core of modernist notions. Characteristics of modernity identified by social theorists such as Giddens and Foucault are central to Chen’s vision of a Chinese modernity: the crucial need to establish social trust; a concern with the expansion of educational institutions and national productive capacities; and an interest in the technologies of efficiency, discipline, and surveillance all figure prominently in his text. Conversely, though, Chen’s effort to express an essentially modernist message was constrained by a narrowly selective political vocabulary drawn from pre-Qin philosophy, and an unnecessarily abstract presentation. In other words, Chen sought to "rectify" a traditional political lexicon, investing that vocabulary with modernist meaning. Although his philosophy suffered from numerous; problems of logic, his apparent shortcomings as an ideologue and propagandist lie chiefly in his recourse to a premodern mode of rhetoric, not in his message. This paper analyzes both the content and the rhetorical construction of Chen’s images of a modern China.
The Bifurcated Nation: Guomindang Use of Agitation and Accommodation Against Missionary Education During the Mid-1920s
Michael G. Murdock, Brigham Young University
During the 1920s, revolutionary Guomindang forces seeking to unify China’s political and social fragmentation encountered stiff resistance to centralizing efforts from foreign-run Christian institutions. Christian schools and universities educated large numbers of Chinese students using curriculum strongly favoring Christian values, pro-Western sentiment, and liberal political tenets. In the long run, these schools aimed to promote a vision of "modern" China in which Christianity itself was closely tied to the definition of "modernity." As that vision became commonly embraced and China "modernized," it was hoped, Christianity stood to gain acceptance and converts.
Revolutionary Guomindang members, however, strongly resented the Christian vision for it competed with their own anti-imperialist, pro-Soviet, socialist vision of China’s future. While revolutionaries could easily impose centralizing measures on Chinese institutions, and often did, fears of foreign reprisals and the integrity of the institutions themselves prevented such steps against Christian institutions. As a result, Guomindang members stirred up mass-based popular riots and demonstrations to weaken the resolve of Christian leaders (both foreign and Chinese) while at the same time offering to intervene and help the Christian schools if they submitted to and accepted government standards. The stratagem worked as most Christian schools in south China accepted revolutionary requests. However, it also pitted forces of agitation against those of accommodation, forcing GMD statebuilders, when agitation turned excessively violent during the Northern Expedition, to intervene by repressing their own agitator-led anti-Christian demonstrations.
Science as a Nation-Building Building Block: Guomindang Approaches to Science and Modernization, 1927–1980
Jacqueline Megan Greene, Gettysburg College
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century Western science became clearly associated for some members of China’s leadership with modernity and modernization, as they endeavored to employ Western scientific techniques to develop military-related industries. By the early twentieth century Chinese leaders were beginning to recognize the importance of both command and production of scientific knowledge to domestic economic, industrial and social modernization on the one hand, and to international representation of China as a modern or developed nation on the other hand. From at least 1928 the Guomindang (GMD) actively promoted scientific research, education, and a scientific approach to life through the construction of institutions, implementation of policies, and use of rhetoric.
Much work has been done on the scientism of May Fourth intellectuals, but relatively little has been done on the GMD’s attempts to integrate the rhetoric or ideology of science into their nation-building scheme. This paper will examine science as an element of the GMD’s modernization scheme from 1927 through the 1970s. It will look comparatively at two significant nation-building phases of GMD rule: the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), and the 1960s and 1970s on Taiwan. How did science, a scientific method, or a scientific attitude constitute a part of the GMD’s conceptualization of modernity? How did GMD conceptions of the value of science to the modernization process change over time? This paper will address these questions and will evaluate GMD attempts to employ science to promote modernity and/or an image of modernity in both concrete and rhetorical terms.
Propagating the National Trust: Image and Ideology in Chinese Paper Money, 1935–1949
Beth Notar, Mt. Holyoke College
This paper illustrates the ways in which the Guomindang and the Communist Party used paper money to propagate ideas of a new Chinese nation. Benedict Anderson has suggested that novels and newspapers, as forms of "print capitalism," were instrumental in developing the idea of the nation. This paper suggests that paper money was another form of print capitalism, and the most effective form for reaching the largest number of people. Paper money, because it was visual rather than textual, could circulate potent images of the modern Chinese nation to a largely illiterate population. Moreover, use of one currency over another came to symbolize trust in the ability of one or another Party to lead the nation into the future.
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