The Blue Shirts Society: Why It Failed, 1932–1938

Abstract

The Blue Shirts were a clandestine political network that appeared inside the Chinese Nationalist movement in 1932, and its most important organization was the Lixingshe; it became one of the most influential right-wing formations of the Nanjing Decade, but it was dissolved in 1938 without any resistance. Research on the movement has mainly asked how it should be classified in ideological terms, that is, whether Chinese fascism was a faithful reproduction of the European models or an unsuccessful one. This paper puts forward a different explanation, in which the decisive factor was organizational. Chiang Kai-shek’s patronage gave Lixingshe members postings in the military, responsibilities in the growing secret police and participation in political training in the army, but it withheld ownership of any of it; they controlled no budget themselves, the membership rolls did not belong to them, and no institutional base would outlast the withdrawal of Chiang’s favor. Organizational autonomy here has three criteria, that is, supervision of recruitment, the possession of independent financial and institutional resources, and the ability to reproduce organizational power after a change of patron. The Blue Shirts satisfied none of these criteria. The Xi’an Incident of December 1936 exposed this dependence, and then, as the Nationalist state was reorganized during the Sino-Japanese War, larger state institutions absorbed Blue Shirt personnel and political functions. The organization itself disappeared, but its political techniques did not.