Hiding in Plain Sight: Fascist Factions during the Nanjing Decade

This chapter traces how anti-Communist groups that coalesced within the Chinese Nationalist Party during the 1923–27 United Front period in Canton transformed into fascist organizations known as the Blue Shirts and CC Clique during the 1927–37 Nanjing Decade. It identifies ways in which their evolving ideas of national development reflected the military and technocratic milieus in which they were schooled (in the United States, the USSR, and Japan), placing particular emphasis on hierarchy, efficiency, and discipline. This chapter further identifies how the covert White Terror operations waged by Chinese fascists assumed a public face via their mass media initiatives. These media initiatives, which embraced modernist aesthetics as well as modern technologies like radio and film, reveal how GMD fascists styled themselves as anticonservative political vanguards and sought to mobilize the wider population around a particular nationalist vision.