Culture, revolution, and modernity: The Guomindang's ideology and enterprise of reviving China, 1927-1937

This dissertation explores the Guomindang's (GMD) ideology of national revival (minzu fuxing) and its material implementation in the 1930s. This ideology expressed the belief that state building should combine elements of Western material modernity with revival of China's national civilization. Supported by Sun Yat-sen's doctrine---"To make a revolution, we must first change hearts and minds" (geming xian ge xin), the ideology of national revival propelled the nationalist revolution into its second stage. In a narrow sense, revival focused on "psychological construction" ( xinli jianshe), the cultural and moral cultivation of revolutionary party members and modern citizens. More broadly, GMD leaders believed that the renovation of Chinese culture provided an essential foundation for a modern state and well-governed society.;The first part of this dissertation examines how the formation of a new power center within the GMD precipitated its ideological reorientation. In the early 1930s, pro-Chiang Kai-shek junior military officers and party veterans established close-knit secret organizations in order to control the army, party, and government from within. Chiang Kai-shek and his leading GMD theorists advocated cultural reconstruction as the effective ideological means to consolidate the party and the nation. During this process of articulating a novel Chinese culture and a new state ideology, the discourse of revolution helped to shape a common GMD identity, imagine a sovereign nation, and motivate change.;The second part of the dissertation illustrates three sites of cultural reconstruction. By constructing hygienic and orderly urban space, the New Life Movement aimed to realize the GMD promise of an "orderly," "clean," "simple," and "austere" Chinese culture. To create a civilized rural society, the Nationalist government socially engineered the elimination of "superstition" ( mixin) and eradication of "shallow customs" (louxi) such as queue-growing and footbinding. After depoliticizing Confucianism as one component of Chinese heritage, the Nanjing government deployed Confucius worship in the service of state-guided cultural nationalism. The nascent nation-state was thus born from a dual enterprise of material development and spiritual nourishment. In this sense, the GMD refashioning of Chinese culture was entwined the multiple tasks of achieving modernity, constructing nation-state, and regulating society.