Spiritual Offenses: The Nativist Prose of Counterinsurgency

This chapter traces the role of nativist discourse in the anti-Communist campaigns waged by the Nationalist military in the early 1930s. Focusing on training materials produced by the Blue Shirts, as well as magazines published for the edification and enjoyment of counterinsurgency soldiers, chapter 3 highlights how Communism was framed as fundamentally alien to China’s Confucian national spirit. Communism was decadent, degenerate, foreign, and antiproductive. This helped to shore up an image of the Nationalist state as productive, familiar, wholesome, and capable of modernizing China without alienating the nation from its cultural roots. It also justified Communist extermination or incarceration in political prisons known as repentance camps. In these camps, prisoners learned how to become productive and obedient members of an orderly Confucian society.