Chapter 44 collective order

Jiang was a lover of tidiness, and was often dismayed when he saw that the leggings of the peasant army under his command were not tightly fastened and the trousers were not buttoned up. .At the second Blue Shirts Congress in Jiangxi, Chiang made a lengthy, stern, and culturally self-defeating speech, announcing: Chinese are afraid of death.As individuals they are very intelligent, but they are too self-sacrificing for their own interests.Is a people without collective spirit... China is very romantic.Discipline is abandoned, law and order tolerate savagery, and all the noble virtues of courtesy and honor are lost... The distinction between liberty and self-interest is blurred, and this is a mistake.Because the Chinese are actually just self-interest seekers, human desires are rampant, politeness is gone and honor is unknown...Chinese people have a very strong sense of vanity.This kind of vanity is not produced today, but from our ancestors...they only wanted high officials and generous salaries.In addition, the biggest problem is hypocrisy and deceit... Chinese people, as modern people lacking individuality, are especially rude and do not know purity.There is filth and grime to the extreme...all of which shows a mentality that is bad for the country...everything is filthy.

Clearly overwhelmed by the tidiness and scientific precision of Japanese and German villages, Chiang Kai-shek seemed to compare toothbrushing and sanitation with the collective power apparatus and popular will embodied by Fascism in the mid-thirties.Moreover, the Chinese clearly and unambiguously associated what they saw as the outstanding military qualities of the Germans with fascism.They feel that it is a nation that is not very threatening to them, because Germany lost their extraterritorial territories in China in the previous world war. In this way, Chiang Kai-shek incorporated his views on fascist military discipline into a neo-Confucian theory of social class and the firmness of family lineage.Undoubtedly, this inherited wisdom revealed traces of his upbringing in a well-to-do farming family, often dominated by a self-righteous mother who believed that children must treat their elders with respect to cleaning the farmhouse.Therefore, the militarization of fascism with Chinese characteristics has become another way to educate the Chinese people with Confucianism.

It was also seen as another way to unite the populace under centralized political rule.The original intention of Lixingshe's National Military Training Movement was to bring together the disunity of the small peasant society and to educate the people on how to "gather together" and "associate" in order to defend themselves, fight against the Communist Party, and resist Japan.To this end, the National Military Training and Education Department was established with the assistant of the Training Directorate.Its task is to establish local national military training associations in all provinces and cities under the leadership of the Executive Yuan.

According to one of its initiators, this civilian military training is a "revolutionary social reform" intended to bring China into the "scientific mass age".Just as the draft constitution of May 5, 1934 established a General Affairs Office the following year to elect representatives to the National Congress, as did the primary elections in 1935 and 1936, this military training campaign was intended to follow Article 24 of Sun Yat-sen's "National Reorganization Plan" Call for: Return power to the people after 1937.In a word, the military training campaign was intended to be part of the general evolution of the ROC political surveillance system that Sun Yat-sen had foreseen, but it was interrupted by the Japanese invasion in July 1937.