Prairie Fire or The Gimo's New Clothes? Chiang Kaishek's New Life Movement

Abstract

Facing Japanese Aggression in the early 1930s, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek reckoned that China's independence and unity could be maintained only by transforming his countrymen into a modern people, industrious and healthy enough to confront the crisis. For“militarization (junshihua), productivization (shengchanhua) and aestheticization (yishuhua)” of people's lifestyle, he launched the New Life Movement (Xin Shenghuo Yundong) in 1934, which was the first nationwide mass mobilization carried out by the Chinese authorities and lasted until the fall of the Nationalist regime in 1949