Abstract
In Shanghai in 2010, as the city prepared to welcome visitors to its world fair, posters were plastered across the city urging residents not to wear pyjamas in public. ‘Be civilized for the Expo’, the slogan read. Such pleas harked back to an earlier moment in Chinese history: the New Life movement of the 1930s, a mass campaign launched by the Nationalist government to transform the outlook and comportment of the Chinese people. Nationalist leaders tried to reform behaviours that they believed lowered China’s standing in the world. No longer, they hoped, would citizens urinate in the street, spit on the ground and disrespect the national anthem. Scholarship has tended to see the New Life campaign as evidence of the hollow authoritarian politics of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, the Guomindang (GMD). In trying to remould the Chinese people from the top down, historians have argued, the GMD revealed its tendency...
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