Popularizing Anti-Communism in Nationalist China

• In Event: Revolution and Reaction in China and Japan during the Interwar Period

Abstract

This paper argues that former communist activists helped popularize with Nationalist officials an anti-communist discourse through volition, coercion or a combination of both. Since the rightwing coup of April 1927 and until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Nationalist Party had set up penal institutions to reform political offenders. New converts to the Nationalist cause contributed reflections to state-run publications on their disillusionment with the communist movement. Together with writings by Nationalist cadres, these first-hand accounts formed a corpus of oftentimes graphic and readily consumed anti-communist imageries that pandered to urbanites’ reading habits. One staple theme common to tabloids and periodicals published by political prisons was voyeuristic depiction of violence and sexual licentiousness. By portraying communists as young hedonists and riffraff, popular anti-communist discourse appealed not to political sympathies for the Nationalists per se. Instead, it fed on conservative anxieties over women emancipation, free love, and the collapse of social order. Popular anti-communist discourse also partook in the trope of an embattled corporealized nation struggling against enfeebling viruses. The Chinese Communist movement was stripped of political meanings and imputed with criminality and moral and physical degradation. By contrast, the Nationalist Party was portrayed as the heroic guarantor of a virile body politic that respected private property and patriarchal authority. The party would lead the masses towards national revival against all odds, beginning with former communists undergoing rebirth in political prisons.

Author

• Brian Tsui, Hong Kong Polytechnic University