New Life Movement

The New Life Movement () was a government-led civic campaign in the 1930s Republic of China to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality and to ultimately unite China under a centralised ideology following the emergence of ideological challenges to the status quo. Chiang Kai-shek as head of the government and the Chinese Nationalist Party launched the initiative on 19 February 1934 as part of an anti-communist campaign, and soon enlarged the campaign to target the whole nation.

Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, who played a major role in the campaign, advocated a life guided by four virtues, lǐ (/, proper rite), yì (/, righteousness or justice), lián (, honesty and cleanness) and chǐ (/, shame; sense of right and wrong). The campaign proceeded with help of the Blue Shirts Society and the CC Clique within the Nationalist Party, and Christian missionaries in China.

Historical context

In February 1934, Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement in Nanchang, Jiangxi, in an effort to unify China with a single ideology.

Chiang claimed that Chinese were "unbearably filthy", "hedonistic", "lazy", and physically and spiritually "decrepit", and thus leading lives that were "barbaric and devoid of reason." Among the anecdotes Chiang used to explain his launching of the movement was a time when he saw a ten-year-old child loitering and smoking.

The New Life targeted the official, educated, and affluent classes in the belief that China's ills could be cured "by example

and exhortation from above." This trickle-down philosophy of societal transformation neatly paralleled a Confucian belief: "The virtue of the

gentleman is like wind; the virtue of the commoner is like grass. Let the wind blow over the grass and it is sure to bend." This concept of "salvation from within" was also purportedly on some level modeled on the Christian notion of changing the world by changing individuals.

Although Meiling acknowledged that the Blue Shirts were "stupid, overzealous, dizzy with success", she also stated that the government did not officially support most of their activities or condone their behavior. Several prominent figures within the KMT itself, however, also openly criticized the New Life Movement. Soong Chingling, Meiling's elder sister who long espoused socialist ideals in contrast with Meiling's more traditional Christian ones, dismissed the New Life Movement as a "pedantic" exercise that "gives nothing to the people" and that such profound emphasis on ancient Confucian ideals of proper behavior were largely impractical and ill-advised in a time when millions of Chinese families were still starving daily. She further argued that, "The aim of revolution is the material welfare of human beings...if that is not reached then there has been no revolution." Their essential differences, with Chingling focusing mostly on the Chinese people's considerable material necessities, and Meiling on what she saw as their people's lofty spiritual needs, contributed to the rift between the two once-close sisters, which eventually led to Chingling leaving the KMT entirely and joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The leading prominent liberal voice in the KMT, Hu Shih, stated that as "there is neither any panacea to save the country nor will there be any miracle cure to revive the nation", the problems that the Movement sought to address were indeed considerable and prevalent, but Chiang's methods of countering them were much less valid, and that the ROC should focus on renewing the material well-being of the Chinese people before trying to revive their so-called spirituality. According to Hu Shih, "When children were scouring rubbish dumps to find half a burnt-out coal, or a bit of filthy rag, how could you accuse them of dishonesty if they pocketed a lost item they had picked up? The first responsibility of the government is to make sure the average man can live a decent life…To teach them how to lead this so-called new life can only be the last thing."

James Gareth Endicott, who served as Meiling's New Life Movement adviser and had a close relationship with her, protested to Meiling about what he saw as the KMT's drift towards non-liberal ideologies, feeling that she was perhaps among the more reasonable members of the Nationalist government. Although Endicott supported some aspects of the Movement, he disagreed that it should be involved in the government. After she urged him to share his growing concerns with Chiang personally, Endicott brusquely told Chiang that if he failed to base the government's domestic policies on the needs of the people, including instituting agrarian reform, then revolutionary forces would eventually rise against him. Chiang replied that while he had plans for land reform, he could not carry them out "while there are so many Communists around to take advantage of it", ending their discussion after a heated exchange.

Chiang's original inception of the New Life Movement purportedly stemmed from his personal negative experiences in both the Soviet Union and in the CCP-controlled parts of China, where he became repulsed by their harsh reality of class struggle. "The poor were told it was right to rob the rich; employees were encouraged to betray or even kill their employers; children were urged to denounce their parents. To Chiang, these 'struck at all the fundamental principles' of traditional Chinese ethics. He took it upon himself to resurrect the ethics of old China, in which loyalty and honour were essential."

Doctrines and principal beliefs

The movement drew on multiple conceptions of modernity.

Women's issues

The New Life Movement opposed the liberalising stance on women's issues of the earlier May Fourth Movement.

Soong urged women to reform the family and to serve the broader needs of society in China.

The movement's women's journal, Women's New Life Movement Monthly, ran from November 1936 to June 1937. It sought to tie the ideas of motherhood, particularly the image of a "super wise wife and good mother" to nationalism. The Movement contended that to be virtuous, women should return to the home.

Influences on the Movement

The ideological strictness of the New Life Movement had many similarities with Neo-Confucianism, which had been the dominant moral philosophy of previous centuries. The New life Movement "four virtues" were taken from Confucian school of thought. Paul Linebarger had stated that the New Life Movement's "principles consist of a simple restatement of the cardinal Confucian personal virtues, interpreted to suit modern conditions."

The historian Lloyd Eastman saw Chiang's goal as unifying China under a singular ideology, a fascist one at that, with the resulting New Life Movement being a popularized or a "sloganized Confucianism". According to Keith Schoppa, the new set of beliefs was seen to be easy to execute, with four main virtues backed by 95 further sub-rules that regulated the everyday life of the regular Chinese citizen.

The Movement's call for women to return to the home as virtuous wives and good mothers was in part influenced by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy's restraints on women's employment.

The Movement was also shaped by Chiang's Christianity. According to Elmer Clark, the new doctrine was "an ambitious moral and ethical enterprise which proposed nothing less than a Chinese renaissance, a complete reformation of the habits, customs and manners of one fourth of the human race, to bring them more in line with the accepted morals of Christian civilisation". Overlapping moral guidelines exist between Confucianism and Christianity. The 95 rules placed in the New Life movement often blur the lines between the influence of the two on the Movement, such as "do not gamble" or "be polite and courteous to women and children".

This Movement has also been accused of having a totalitarian element. Dirlik sees the movement as a "modern counterrevolution" opposed to an "anti-revolutionary conservatism" due to the fact that it instrumentalised traditional moral codes and societal constructs. Some historians regard this movement as imitating Nazism and regarded this movement as being a neo-nationalistic movement used to elevate Chiang's control of everyday lives. Frederic Wakeman described the New Life Movement as "Confucian fascism". Historian Maggie Clinton likewise characterizes the movement as fascist.

Reception

Despite the grandiose goal of revitalising and revolutionising China, the New Life Movement ultimately ended in failure as both domestic and foreign reception remained paltry throughout the duration of the movement. The combination of the movement's inability to formulate a systematic ideology and the seeming banality of its concerns caused both Chinese and foreign commentators to ignore the significance of New Life ideology and intentions and instead to stress the more superficial aspects of the movement. Consequently, the movement was approached variously as a joke, or to those taking it more seriously, a shallow and antiquated regression to Chinese tradition when tradition had already proved incapable of solving China's problems. Historian Suzy Kim summarizes its failure as due to a "lack of cohesion." From the perspective of some impoverished Chinese citizens, the policies of Marxists were far more practical and coherent, leading to the lack of significance attributed to the New Life Movement. On a Western perspective, Chiang's complex code of ethics was far too abstract and lacking in action to be useful or pragmatic, perceived as being superficial and inordinately idealistic.  

The lack of popular domestic reception is exacerbated by the behaviour of the Blue Shirts, a far-right fascist group that enforced the rules of the New Life Movement. Historian Sterling Seagrave writes "by 1936, the Blue Shirts were running amok, driven by excesses of zeal and brutality, giving the New Life Movement a bad name". The Literary Digest observed that year, 'Most likely to upset the teacups were Chiang's own civilian, anti-foreign, bombing, stabbing, shooting 'Blue Shirt' terrorists, who once useful, now unmanageable, have become something of a Frankenstein monster." The association of the violent and repressive behaviour of the Blue Shirts compounded the less than enthusiastic reception of the Movement, further attributing to it a negative reputation as well.

The New Life Movement's ideas about women's place in the home as "wise wives and good mothers" were opposed by various contemporaries. A feminist-oriented group of women activists within the KMT responded to the idea by asserting that Confucianism required gender reciprocity and that both men and women should cultivate the virtues needed for a healthy family and strong society. Communist writers contended that the New Life Movement's attempt to return women to the home was a Hitler-esque attempt to control women and that by pushing women into the home at a time of national crisis, the New Life Movement's stance on women served the interests of foreign imperialism.

Other historians assert that the New Life Movement was not without its merits and positive values either, although they also concede it was not able to offset the KMT's painstaking struggle to resolve China's deep-rooted and complex socioeconomic problems.

According to Jonathan Fenby, "Many New Life rules were eminently sensible, such as those advocating healthy living, cleanliness, vaccination, and the killing of flies and mosquitoes. Compared to attempts to re-educate and dragoon the Chinese people by Chiang's Communist successor, the movement was positively benign. But, in a country with problems on the scale of those faced by China, the initiative was like the admonitions of a frustrated father wagging his finger at his unruly children. The message never reached the bulk of illiterate peasants, who were, in any case, more concerned with survival than with wearing their hats straight. Being told to eat in silence and go to bed early could only make the modern-minded urban elite regard the regime as a bunch of petty busybodies." Fenby also notes that modern-day China itself has also tried similar government-sponsored efforts to encourage the Chinese people to "behave better", citing the Public Morality Day of autumn 2003 as "a loud echo of the New Life movement."

Rana Mitter commented that, "Despite its anti-communism, it shared many values and assumptions with the CCP, with its stress on frugality and collective values. Yet it never had much success. While China suffered from a massive agricultural and fiscal crisis, prescriptions about clothes and orderly behaviour did not have much popular traction." He also asserted that contemporary China has consciously or not imitated many aspects of the New Life Movement in recent years, pointing to Chinese society, where points are given by local committees to residents who throw away their

garbage and put out plants to decorate their houses. In the run-up to the Olympics, Beijing residents were told of a new 'morality evaluation index' which would give credit for 'displays of patriotism, large book collections, and balconies full of potted plants' and lower grades for 'alcohol abuse, noise complaints, pollution, or a violation of licences covering internet cafes and karaoke parlours'. Public toilets in tourist areas are also being upgraded and star-rated."

Jay Taylor argues that Chiang's motives for launching the New Life Movement were overall understandable given China's dire situation at the time, even if it did not achieve the results that many had hoped or imagined, nor did Chiang really seek to use the Movement itself to engage in imperialism, but to address legitimately overwhelming issues in Chinese society: "The values that the movement sought to inculcate were mostly simple neo-Confucian merits and traditional Japanese habits—frugality and conscience, simplicity, honesty, and even promptness, hygiene, and neatness. For critics,

the disturbing aspect of the movement was its intention to "thoroughly militarize the lives of the citizens of the entire nation." Yet the purpose of this

"complete militarization" was not to conquer other people but to cultivate "courage and swiftness, the endurance of suffering, a tolerance of hard work,

especially the habit and ability of unified action." The aim was to say "farewell to yesterday's barbarian way of life, its disorderliness, lethargy, and depression." These were hardly objectionable goals, especially when framed in the innocent bromides of Confucius and Christ." He also notes that Chiang developed deep personal reservations regarding the Blue Shirts, having mused in a letter to the newspaper Dagongbao, "How would I differ from the Communists...if I were to imitate the so-called fascists...of Italy?" and by mid-1934, had become "thoroughly disillusioned with the organization". Unlike the Brown Shirts, who numbered two million and functioned as Hitler's private paramilitary around the same time period, the exclusive Blue Shirts had only about three hundred official members when it finally disbanded in 1938.

Implementations

The New Life Movement aimed to control Chinese lifestyles.

The early practical measures of the movement sought emphasized hygiene.

Historical evaluations

In the words of Soong Mei-ling's biographer, the New Life Movement was a "curious East-West ideological fusion of neo-Confucian precepts, thinly disguised, New Testament Christianity, YMCA-Style social activism, elements of Bushido—the samurai code—and European fascism, along with a generous dose of New England Puritanism." She concluded that, "In reality, the real and lasting impact of the New Life Movement on Chinese society was limited. Albeit noble, its battle against the immemorial ills of Chinese life—gambling, opium, debauchery, poverty, begging, robbery, filth, corruption, and indifference to the public good amounted to tilting at windmills. A mass movement that rejected popular initiative, New Life tried to imbue the public with a political consciousness while denying it a political voice." Arif Dirlik explains the Movement as motivated by the need to counter Chinese Communist Party (CCP) successes in both ideological appeal and political organization.

Historian Suzy Kim contrasts the New Life Movement with the later Cultural Revolution. While both movements had superficial similarities in terms of changing everyday behavior, "The New Life Movement sought to expand the power of the state and was instituted from the top down for the purposes of mobilizing people around its own agenda as a form of 'controlled popular mobilization,' whereas the Cultural Revolution was a bottom-up movement that periodically escaped control of the state[.]"

According to Hans van de Ven, "Although it is easy to lampoon the New Life Movement – as indeed it was at the time – it has had a long influence. Even today many schools and offices in China display 'civility certificates' in the same way that those in the West display hygiene and health and safety certifications. Today, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping's administration has again imposed limits on entertainment allowances and continues to campaign against extravagance. New Life ideals have sufficiently broad appeal that their promotion bolsters the standing of those in power. He also points to the Hunan peasant revolution in 1927, in which former CCP leader Mao Zedong noted that "they [the peasantry] were eradicating the old China's vices of gambling, opium-smoking, vulgar opera performances, superstition, excessive feasting and banditry", through which Mao defended the use of extreme force to end what he saw as corrupt and harmful practices. Mao himself eventually implemented the 'Three Rules of Discipline' (obedience to orders, no confiscations of peasant property and the prompt surrender to higher authority of all things taken from landlords) and 'Eight Points of Attention' (politeness, honesty, courtesy to women and so on) in an effort to make Chinese soldiers aspire to higher standards of behavior.

Cultural references

Xinsheng Road, a major arterial road in Taipei, is named after the movement.

Notes

References and further reading

"Americans and Ideological Reform: The New Life Movement," in , pp. 151– 174.