Although absent from the title, The Making and Unmaking of the Chinese Radical Right is essentially a history of the formation and decline of the Chinese Youth Party (CYP, Zhongguo qingniandang), which was founded in Paris in December 1923 by a band of Chinese intellectuals and students. Chinese historiography of the CYP has not been kind given the latter's anti-Communist outlook. As the author explains, even before 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang (KMT) alike vilified the CYP and Mao Zedong pronounced one of its main leaders, Zeng Qi (1892–1951), a war criminal in 1948. Following the CCP's victory, the CYP's image became tainted further—the CYP was depicted as “backward,” “rightist,” “reactionary,” or “fascist” (2). Even Anglophone scholarship on the May Fourth period has “enriched rather than modified” the binary “GMD-CCP paradigm,” whereas recent scholarship on the KMT has not revised the finding that the KMT lacked a strong mass base (4, 12–13).
By contrast, Hirayama contends that “the most representative nativist or conservative party embracing ‘Confucian China’ with a strong mass-political activism” was not the KMT but the CYP in the 1920s and 1930s (13). Hence, the history of the CYP is indispensable for understanding both the rise of mass party politics in China and the connection between May Fourth and the development of the Chinese “radical right.” For the CYP, this position entailed “cultural conservatism,” “political elitism,” and “integral nationalism,” complemented by trade protectionism in the international realm and “socialist interventionism” domestically (7–8). However, despite the CYP's national socialism, Hirayama rejects the term “Chinese fascism” because, in his view, the CYP did not advocate racial purity and did not discard “the democratic heritage of the French Revolution”—it was not against political liberalism per se (8–10). Methodologically, the author seeks to reveal the CYP's crucial role in shaping the Chinese “radical right” by concentrating on “the interactions of ideas and actions in actual sociopolitical reality” (14).
The book's introduction is followed by six chapters and a conclusion. The six chapters are organized based on the three main stages of the CYP's development, with chapters two and three covering the initial rise and radicalization of the May Fourth “right” in Europe and China. Chapter two starts with the establishment of the Young China Association (YCA) in Beijing in 1918 and details how the ideas of journalist and reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and philologist and revolutionary Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) functioned as “ideological reservoirs” for the later CYP founders (25). From there, it details the early experiences and activities of Zeng Qi, Wang Guangqi (1892–1936), Li Dazhao (1889–1927), and other May Fourth youth, followed by the influence of republicanism and “Proudhonian social anarchism” on the YCA members (44). The chapter then delves deeper into the YCA as a learning community, its networks and branches, its emphasis on self-cultivation and mass education, and its role as a public intellectual platform concerned with religion (which some YCA members opposed) and women's liberation (although the YCA lacked female members). Chapter three examines the rise of the Communists and CYP founders as members of the same work-study movement in Europe and the emergence of divergent political views between the “proletarian” Communists and the YCA “intellectuals.” Lastly, it covers the empowerment of Chinese Communists in Europe on the left and the founding of the CYP in Paris on the right.
The next stage in the history of the CYP is laid out in chapters four, five, and six, which investigate its involvement in mass politics across China in the 1920s and 1930s in terms of ideology, collaboration with warlords, military actions, and local organization. More specifically, chapter four briefly examines national socialism, followed by a discussion of bottom-up mass mobilization and top-down alignments with regional warlords. The CYP used this distinct model of “collaborative party-military relations” for its “plebiscitarian revolution” (quanmin geming) (100). Chapter five looks at the mobilization of radical youth through propaganda and anti-Japanese movements and resistance activities, internal struggles within the CYP, and military challenges to the KMT in the form of the 1933 uprising in western Hunan. The chapter ends with the CYP's involvement in the fractured and ultimately unsuccessful Fujian Rebellion. Finally, chapter six probes the “sociopolitical basis” of the CYP's effective “local operations” in Sichuan through the figure of Li Huang (1895–1991) and his associates (178). Three elements of cooperation are covered: CYP involvement with student societies and teacher groups, with the local gentry, and with local warlords such as Liu Xiang (1890–1938). The third and final stage of development of the CYP is described in chapter seven, which explores the transformation of the CYP from a revolutionary to a civil opposition party from the late 1930s onwards. It considers the end of the CYP's radical nationalism with China's membership in the international alliance against Japan, the CYP's role in the formation of the Chinese Democratic League, and its interactions with the KMT in setting up a system of constitutional governance. Finally, the conclusion returns to the matter of the Chinese political right in the twentieth century from global and Chinese perspectives, with the latter section briefly comparing the CYP with KMT “Blue Shirts” in the 1930s and the “right-turning CCP since the 1990s” (250).
The main strength of the book is its extensive reliance on archives, investigative reports by both the CCP and KMT, and newspaper articles to reconstruct the activities, mobilization efforts, and networks of CYP leaders. The author has consulted archives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan, including Chinese provincial, municipal, and county archives, as well as the Zeng Qi Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives. Hirayama should be commended for drawing on this vast array of primary sources to provide a detailed understanding of mass politics during the Republican period. However, underneath the lengthy analyses of mobilization strategies, warlord politics, and military activities, the question of why Chinese youth would be loyal to the CYP rather than the CCP or KMT remains largely unanswered. For example, the author states that the radical educated youths on the right considered the CYP a “truly revolutionary party” due to its “sound ideologies and actions” (124). But what made these ideologies “sound” in their eyes? What was distinctive about the CYP that made it attractive given that federalism and corporatism, as the author notes, were generally “fashionable” at the time (109)? What made their actions more “sound” given that the CYP was just as “authoritarian” and “militant” as the CCP and KMT (111)? If “the CYP's adaptation of national socialism to China” rendered it “easier for educated Chinese youth to embrace in the post-May Fourth years,” why and how did this occur (100)?
It is also challenging to assess to what extent mobilization translated into actual “political power” (15). Given that other authors consider the cultural nationalism and conservatism of the CYP to have been an obstacle to political power, could mobilization alone have remedied the issue? To answer this question, more detailed explanation of why the CYP has been considered “politically powerless” in existing literature would have been worthwhile (16). More engagement with literature on Chinese conservatism overall could have also shed light on the matter. This literature is, however, not considered precisely because it emphasizes “the inability or failures of Chinese conservatives in causing mass political movements during the Republican era” (22). Also related to the issue of conservatism in China is the lack of coverage of recent reinterpretations of May Fourth that highlight cultural and historical continuity rather than revolution and discontinuity.
Another question that comes to mind is: How successful could “mass” mobilization have been given that the CYP primarily consisted of the “educated class” and primarily targeted educational circles, often through elitist journals (104)? And how was this justified given the rhetoric of “integral nationalism” and “plebiscitarian revolution”? How were strategies such as “organized assassinations,” reliance on local militias, and collaboration with warlords received by CYP supporters and the “masses”? (122)? Although the author rightly notes the risk of the “over-estimation of the CYP's role” (16) in this effort to make it visible, one does get the sense that he holds the underlying assumption that the CYP's ideology was viable in and of itself. Also, he espouses the notion that the CYP ideology always corresponded to the actions of its leaders—“the CYP founders practiced what they believed” (16)—but this has never been the case in politics anywhere. Overall, a detailed and systematic critique of the CYP's shortcomings and the tensions between ideology and practice is wanting.
To stay on the topic of the relation between ideas and actions, a more methodical analysis of the “unmaking” of the “radical right” referred to in the title, would have also been valuable. The book treats the “decline” of the CYP rather abruptly and haphazardly, and suggests that external factors were the main reason: the CYP “lost its revolutionary momentum” when the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937. It had no “resilience” and its military actions were “not sustainable in an adverse environment.” Ideologically, “ultranationalism” suddenly lost its appeal when China became an ally of the USA and UK against Japan in the 1940s (176). Furthermore, the CYP suffered from “a lack of solid military power and consistent financial sources” (207). Some of these factors, however, were presumably longer-term issues and deserve more attention, whereas other factors have been left out. Lastly, only one sentence refers to the CYP's later history in Taiwan (256).
Regarding structure, many of the figures, movements, and ideas make a sudden entry, so the narrative thread can be hard to follow for those who are not already familiar with this period. The sections and chapters sometimes appear disconnected, while chapters also overlap at times, perhaps because some of the latter were published earlier as articles. A few mistakes will unavoidably slip into every book, but this book could have done with more editing as there are countless pinyin errors and typos throughout the book. Although the chronology at the start is extremely useful, a brief list of the main actors with a short biography and affiliation would have helped to provide an overview of the various groups and the interactions between them.
