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From China’s Good War (Rana Mitter, 2020) pp38-42

Later in the war Jiang Tingfu’s views on political freedom and modernization would change significantly, after he spent time in the United States and became inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal. But at this point, early in the war against Japan, his was an elite voice, well connected in government, speculating on how to achieve the successful formation of the nation-state. Jiang reiterated the need for modernization, with particular reference to wartime preparation, in an essay on “national strength.” In this essay, which deals with the transformation of the nation through wartime institutions and processes aimed at improving the economy and healthcare, Jiang equates nurturing bodily health with maintaining a healthy body politic. He describes Nazi Germany’s Four-Year Plan and the USSR’s Five-Year Plan as “national defense plans,” noting that young people were being trained as warriors and that reproduction was encouraged: “Stalin and Hitler both put plenty of stress on women’s childbearing, their reasons being preparation for war.”26 Jiang contrasted this view with that of Britain, citing a speech by Anthony Eden, who had resigned in February 1938 as British foreign secretary, in which Eden asked whether those who loved freedom would be as willing to make sacrifices as those in the authoritarian countries. He concluded from Eden’s speech that democracies “have not greatly gone in for developing national strength.” For China, the most important task was ” psychological reform.” This kind of reform necessitated “wholesale modernization,” from the military to the educational system. At this time, Jiang strongly advocated the establishment of a polity that looked very much like the “total defense state” that had formed in Japan as the government became militarized: Some ask: after the war is over, do we not want to restore the situation as it was in normal times? But we have to know: at this historical juncture, war is the normality! So-called peace is just a period of preparing for war, a time of political and economic struggle. In times up to the present, we have no way of avoiding conflict. We cannot retreat to protect our independence…. This is a whole historical stage; it is not just a matter of three to five years. Jiang was not alone in expressing this sense of war as “normality.” Chinese intellectuals and politicians of the era spoke of it as being an “exceptional time” (feichang shiqi), an idea reminiscent of the “state of exception” defined by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, adapting the idea of the legal theorist Carl Schmitt. In this phrasing, “exceptional” implied the heightened state of crisis and expectation of conflict that marked the early twentieth century, in contrast to a perception of a (perhaps nonexistent) earlier period of peace.29 While Jiang saw the importance of a strong economy, he understood that national feeling might also stem from causes that were not simply economic. He discussed two cases that had taken place in recent years in Germany. He noted that local Germans involved in the Ruhr crisis of 1923 had refused to accept exemptions they had been offered on indemnity taxes; he also saw the heavy vote in the 1935 Saar plebiscite in favor of return to Germany, despite financial incentives from the French to vote the other way in both cases. “This kind of national spirit depends on ourselves to develop it,” noted Jiang. “Foreigners can’t help us, nor can they stop us.”30 In 1938, Jiang’s views were consistent with the Nationalist Party’s view that the war should be used to build a sense of national identity on terms that would bring about an ordered state, rather than on the basis of individual liberties or collective democracy as the most important values. Was the wartime Nationalist state in fact authoritarian, and, if so, what sort of authoritarianism did it espouse? At base, its ideology was defined more by values than by a system. The framework behind it was the Three People’s Principles of Sun Yat-sen—nationalism, rights, and people’s livelihood-but much of the language defining those ideas was general, vague, and self-contradictory. A dominant section of the party clearly had right-wing political views.31 One critic at the time who stressed what he saw as the fascist nature of the Nationalists was Hu Qiaomu, a senior politician, theorist, and historian of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who wrote in 1943, as Mussolini’s regime was collapsing in Italy, that the Nationalists had “received significant influence” from the Italian fascists. Although the conservative and fascist elements in the Nationalist Party were undeniably powerful, they were not the only important elements of the party. T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), a major figure in the internal mechanics of the party, along with politicians such as Sun Ke (Sun Fo), the son of Sun Yat-sen, were relatively more liberal. The Nationalist government was a strange mixture of different political ideologies, …