New life: State mobilization and women's place in Nationalist China, 1934--1949

This dissertation offers the first gendered analysis of the New Life Movement, the centerpiece of GMD (Nationalist Party) nation-building in China in the 1930s and 1940s. It provides new insight into a state-initiated social movement that aimed at disciplining Chinese bodies and minds by applying "traditional" Chinese ethical values of li-yi-lian-chi (etiquette, justice, integrity, and conscientiousness) to their everyday lives, yi-shi-zhu-xing (clothing, food, residence, and behavior). Women were both the major targets and the desired agents of this modernizing project. While the movement attempted to regulate and define Chinese womanhood, women's participation redirected the trajectory of the movement.;The dissertation pays particular attention to the mobilization programs led by the Women's Guidance Committee, an organization that emerged as an auxiliary of the Nationalist state to promote the New Life Movement among women and that later was transformed into the leading national organization responsible for wartime women's mobilization during the War against Japan. It compares the approaches of the GMD and the CCP to women's mobilization to reveal striking similarities of the content and practice of women-work, commonly recognized as a CCP concept, under the two rival ideologies. It also compares the Women's Guidance Committee with the All-China Women's Federation, a CCP auxiliary of women's mobilization after 1949, and explores their shared organizational characteristics.;The study of women's activities in the New Life Movement saves it from academic neglect and public oblivion through exploring its present-day legacies as embodied in the Socialist Spiritual Civilization Construction campaigns of the 1980s and the attempt to reconfigure Beijing in anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games. Through comparing the design and techniques of the New Life Movement and later social engineering programs in the People's Republic, my dissertation sheds light on Chinese nation-building throughout and beyond the 20th century.