Literature and Arts for the Nation Available to Purchase

This chapter examines how the Blue Shirts and CC Clique worked to create nationalist literature and arts (minzu wenyi) and how they understood literature and the arts as key vehicles for the consolidation of new social meanings. It further examines how the terror that they waged against left-wing cultural elites aimed not merely to silence critics of the Nationalist government but especially to speed the revolution along. By closely examining Chen Lifu’s 1933 tract The Chinese Film Industry and CC Clique spy chief Xu Enceng’s narrative of the kidnapping and detention of the female Communist writer Ding Ling, this chapter underscores how fascists prized the efficient creation of a singular national voice. It is also in their prescriptions for nationalist literature and arts that fascism’s competing vectors of elitism and populism are particularly apparent.