The past decade has seen a global resurgence of right-wing authoritarian political culture, matched in intellectual circles by a resurgence of interest in historical precedents; within the China field, this attention has focused on the ideological foundations of China's right-wing Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD) in the 1930s. China's Conservative Revolution, Brian Tsui's thoughtful intellectual history of party theoreticians within the GMD, joins Maggie Clinton's Revolutionary Nativism in examining the political culture of the Nationalist Party by resituating it within a similar global moment of fascist and right-wing ascendancy.1 At the heart of Tsui's analysis is the claim that, following the anti-communist purge of 1927, intellectuals within the party articulated a Nationalist political platform that was both conservative and revolutionary—conservative in its strict opposition to class antagonism, while also revolutionary in its self-consciously modern attempt to build a productive, unified society capable of “transcend[ing] the Euro-American materialist order”...
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