<\/p>\n
As argued by Maggie Clinton in Revolutionary Nativism, nationalism can be a \u2018Janus-faced\u2019 phenomenon[1]<\/a>. In the early twentieth century, Chinese revolutionaries looked to their nation\u2019s past to \u2018remap\u2019 the present by invoking the idea of a \u2018national spirit\u2019[2]<\/a>. Apparently existing from time immemorial, \u2018national spirit\u2019 would be the source of China\u2019s modernisation, facilitating the social, political and cultural revolutions necessary for China\u2019s national rejuvenation. This article examines two somewhat contradictory notions of \u2018national spirit\u2019- the Guomindang\u2019s (GMD) invocation of Confucianism and Shifu\u2019s appeal to Buddhism- arguing that such notions were imagined to support specific revolutionary agendas and to create a unified sense of Chinese identity in the face of foreign imperialism.<\/p>\n Liu Shifu was an anarchist of the early twentieth century who, disgusted by the moral decline and subservience of China to foreign powers, endeavoured to initiate moral reform for the purposes of strengthening the Chinese nation. In 1908, after being sent to prison for a failed assassination attempt, Shifu wrote his \u2018prison essays\u2019 which contained his thoughts on the \u2018national essence\u2019 of China[3]<\/a>. Shifu blamed Confucianism for the supposed moral decline of China, arguing that it legitimized the self-serving Manchu government[4]<\/a>. Furthermore, he detested the fact that Confucianism claimed sole heritage of the classics and that it was regarded as the fount of all wisdom in China[5]<\/a>. For Shifu, the \u2018national essence\u2019 or spirit of China could be found in the precepts of Buddhism, from which one could discern universal values that would aid social reform[6]<\/a>. One such value was gender equality, which Buddhist scriptures supposedly buttressed by arguing that women are more in tune with their spirituality than men and can thus more easily acquire the Buddha-nature[7]<\/a>.<\/p>\n This invocation of Buddhism as exemplifying the \u2018national spirit\u2019 of China is the antithesis to the GMD\u2019s notion that it should reflect Confucian ideals. The GMD, who ruled China from 1927 until the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, sought to revive Confucianism from the attacks levelled against it by revolutionaries such as Shifu, but also from the New Culture and May Fourth movements which sought wholesale cultural and social revolution[8]<\/a>. They viewed Confucian principles such as filial piety and interpersonal obligation as necessary to cultivate citizens who would devote their lives to the nation[9]<\/a>. Confucianism also fostered social harmony, thereby uniting China\u2019s myriad ethnic groups together under a singular national spirit[10]<\/a>. According to Clinton, this idea of social harmony also sanctioned violence against those people who threatened national cohesion, thereby legitimizing the militarist regime that the GMD were seeking to create[11]<\/a>.<\/p>\n The social harmony indicative of the \u2018national spirit\u2019 therefore gave the GMD a prism through which to oppose western encroachment on Chinese culture and identity. Hence, a key similarity between the GMD and Shifu\u2019s conceptualization of a singular Chinese spirit is that they saw it as necessary to revitalize the Chinese civilization after a period of marked decline. For example, Shifu idolized Buddhist monks such as Yuekong of the Shaolin monastery who fought with 3,000 soldiers against the Japanese at Songjiang, thereby exemplifying the ideal of \u2018daring to die\u2019 for the nation: a key principle if China was going to truly withstand foreign interference[12]<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the contradictory contents of these ideas of \u2018national spirit\u2019 are indicative of its malleability as a concept. Both the GMD and Shifu cherry-picked aspects of China\u2019s past in order to support their respective revolutionary agendas. The expediency of the idea of a \u2018national spirit\u2019 is particularly true if we consider that Buddhism was a foreign import to China, which is an irony that anarchists such as Shifu were willing to ignore[13]<\/a>. Nonetheless, despite the artificial nature of such an idea as ‘national spirit’, its utility is evident as a rhetorical device to help unify the Chinese nation, and more importantly, to construct an independent essence of Chinese identity that stood in opposition to foreign intervention.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Maggie Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism: fascism and culture in China, 1925-1937<\/em>, (Durham, 2017), p. 64.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em><\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Edward Krebs, Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism<\/em>, (Lanham, 1998), p.47.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> pp.47-50.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Ibid<\/em>., p.50.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> p.51.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> pp.51-52.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism,<\/em> p.67.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> p.73.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> p.10.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> p.11.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Krebs, Shifu,<\/em> pp.57-58.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Ibid.,<\/em> p.49<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As argued by Maggie Clinton in Revolutionary Nativism, nationalism can be a \u2018Janus-faced\u2019 phenomenon[1]. In the early twentieth century, Chinese revolutionaries looked to their nation\u2019s past to \u2018remap\u2019 the present by invoking the idea of a \u2018national spirit\u2019[2]. Apparently existing from time immemorial, \u2018national spirit\u2019 would be the source of China\u2019s modernisation, facilitating the … Continue reading “‘National Spirit’ in the revolutionary agendas of Liu Shifu and the Guomindang.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,97,95,96],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-20th-century","tag-guomindang","tag-national-spirit","tag-shifu"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":749,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions\/749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}