Whilst mostly a fragmented and urban phenomenon throughout its existence, since the start of the twentieth century, the National Product Movement and its advocates provided a catalyst in the development of a modern Chinese national identity via the promotion of a domestic consumer culture in an era of indirect economic imperialism. At the same time, it also contributes to the increased awareness of China’s vulnerable position in the world, vis-à-vis the global economy. At the same time, within the general scholarship of Chinese history, there has been a drive to reassess the significance of Nanjing decade between 1927 and 1937, when most of China was under the control of Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang (GMD). In essence, moving away from CCP-centric revolutionary narrative. In particular, there is an emphasis on reconsidering the successes and failures of the GMD’s attempts at nation-building via policies and campaigns such as the New Life Movement in 1934 and restoration of sovereignty from foreign domination in that period. Thus, the rhetorics and actions of the National Products Movement often intertwined with the GMD’s vision of a modern Chinese identity, especially during the national crises of the 1930s. While the National Products Movement historically preceded the Nanjing decade, the instability and uncertainties of that period allowed for the Movement to manifest itself with greater intensity and thus, contributed to ruptures in the evolution of Chinese nationalism. This is one aspect that is lacking in the scholarly treatment of the period. Through examining English-language newspaper coverage of the Movement in the 1930s and existing scholarship, the purpose of this paper is to further understand and assess the extent to which the national crises of the Nanjing decade contributed to ruptures in the evolution of the National Products Movement and that of Chinese nationalism as a whole. On another note, this paper will also look at how different stakeholders in society at the time viewed and used the Movement for their own agenda and other questions include the links between consumption and nationalism, as well as connections with the New Life Movement and the National Salvation Movement, as well as the gender dimension.
In order to understand the significance of the National Products Movement in relations to the evolution of Chinese nationalism in the Nanjing decade, it is important to have an overview of the general historiography of the period. In the scholarship of the history of modern China, there has been a general shift beyond the revolutionary narrative which previously emphasised on the incompetence and corruption of the Nationalist regime and the inevitable triumph of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by 1949. In particular, there has been a reassessment of the roles of the Guomindang-led government under Chiang Kai-shek through examining in-depth its attempts at nation-building and restoring sovereignty from foreign control during a period of the Republic of China (ROC), commonly known as the Nanjing decade, between 1927 and 1937. In particular, this shift was driven by the increased availability of sources and materials for research due to the opening-up of the PRC in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well in Taiwan.1 For example, Frederic Wakeman’s study of the Blue Shirts Society in the early 1930s through the ideological lens of a ‘Confucian fascism’ in order to analyse the nature of Chiang’s regime. Other more recent scholarships include Felix Boecking’s book on the attempts by the Nationalist regime to gain control of the Maritime Customs Service, not only a source of tariff revenue but also a symbol of political legitimacy and wrestling of sovereignty from foreign economic influence during the Nanjing Decade.3 Therefore, this new literature allows for greater understanding of how the Nationalist regime sought to, with varied levels of success, build a modern Chinese nation-state in their own image and how that intersected with periods of national crises in the 1930s, in which there was greater urgency with intensification of Japanese aggression.
On another note, this shift in scholarship has also led to greater emphasis on a study of social themes, trends and patterns in Chinese society in the first half of the twentieth century and their contributions to the evolution of a modern Chinese identity. One of these themes is that of consumerism, which has attracted considerable scholarly attention. A particular example is Karl Gerth’s book, which looks at ways consumerism and the emergence of a consumer culture played a pivotal role in defining and circulating Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century.4 In particular, the intersection of domestic consumerism and national identity articulated through the National Products Movement, which would become a vital expression of that commodification of nationalism throughout the Movement’s existence, especially in times of national crises, and the main focus of this paper. Other studies also looked at consumer culture and habits in cosmopolitan urban spaces such as Shanghai. This included Marie-Claire Bergère’s study of Shanghai, particularly as a space of expression of a Chinese vision of modernity in the form of haipai , which is tightly linked with commercialism and its surrounding discourses. While the literature on this aspect of modern Chinese history is relatively extensive, however there are still gaps for further research. This includes looking into the National Products Movement during the national crises of the 1930s and how its activism and discourses intersected with the Nationalist’s nation-building projects such as the New Life Movement and other popular movements such as the National Salvation Movement during this period. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address the question of whether that period resulted in ruptures for the Movement and how that was received by its participants, which came from diverse backgrounds, albeit mostly urban. In terms of sources, due to language barriers, it will primarily draw upon English-language newspaper sources published in Shanghai in this period up to 1937 before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. There will also be considerations of other aspects such as gender dimension and exploration of other potential new areas for research.
In order to properly address this question, it is vital to establish the necessary historical context for the National Products Movement and the domestic context of 1930s Nationalist China. With regards to the National Products Movement, according to scholars such as Karl Gerth, it had its origin in the intrinsic long-term links between an exposure to Western material culture and capitalist practices in the nineteenth century, during the loss of China’s sovereignty as a result of the Treaty Port system and concessions made to the foreign powers and the discourse of “commercial warfare” promoted by Chinese reformers and first generation of industrialists, in which uncontrolled foreign access to Chinese markets would hinder China’s ability to assert its sovereignty and develop an industrialised economy. Thus, the language and vocabulary of this discourse would have shaped these actors’ perceptions of China’s relationship with the outside world and provided the ideological foundations for the National Products Movement. Furthermore, the institutional encouragement of commerce through the creation of bureaucratic infrastructures for the purpose of promoting native commercial and industrial developments such as passing laws and establishing chambers of commerce down to the provincial level.7 In turn, allowing for a private commercial sphere to flourish. In addition, this is placed within the wider context of China at the time, during which the legitimacy of the Qing dynasty came under increased scrutiny from members of the reformist elites due to its perceived incompetence in defending China’s economic and territorial interests. This can be seen by Japanese and Russian advances into Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), trade deficits, struggling industries and indebtedness, as well as anti-immigration legislatures targeting Chinese labourers in the United States. A combination of these crises resulted in an earlier incarnation of the National Products Movement through a boycott of American products such as flours and cottons in the summer of 1905, which attracted the participation of a wide range of sections of urban society, including students, merchants, workers and officials. This boycott also coupled with the Qing’s own Rights Recovery Movement in the same period, which was designed to counter foreign economic and territorial aggression through recovering lost concessions and promoting indigenous industrialism.
While the 1905 boycott failed to achieve its immediate aims, it actually set the precedents and continuities in terms of the kìnd of activism and discourses that would define the National Products Movement in the succeeding decades, which include boycott and a ‘foreign’/’national’ or ‘native’ dichotomy in consumption, especially times of national crises. Furthermore, because of its fluidity and lack of cohesive coordination, there would be intersections between the National Products Movement and other urban social movements in this period. At the same time, due to the participation of a wide range of actors and stakeholders, it is important to take into account the differing agenda and the relationship between the state and these social groups with the regards to the Movement.
Moving on, it is important to establish the context of China under Nationalist rule, especially from the 1930s onwards. As mentioned, between 1927 and 1937, much of China was under the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s GMD following the Northern Expedition. Due to the capital being moved to Nanjing, the period of Nationalist rule was commonly referred to as the Nanjing. It was in this period, the GMD attempted to implement several attempts at restoring sovereignty, as well as modernisation projects with the aim of creating a modern, unified state. On the economic front, it sought to do so. After taking power, the Nationalist government reclaimed tariff autonomy in 1929 through successful negotiations with the foreign powers and regaining control of the Maritime Customs, which had significant symbolism, particularly for the National Products Movement. This was significant due to the connections made between tariff on foreign imports and sovereignty within the Chinese nationalist discourse that informed the National Products Movement, in which the revolutionary Sun Yatsen, founder of both the ROC and the GMD, articulated that regaining tariff autonomy was part of a comprehensive strategy to limit foreign economic domination in China.11 The success of the Nationalist government in regaining tariff autonomy, as shown in Boecking’s scholarship, also contributed to a revision of the original narrative of the GMD being incompetent and corrupt.
At the same time, one should also contextualise the national crises of the 1930s in relations to the Nationalist government and the National Products Movement. Externally, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 resulted in the Great Depression for the global economy, of which China was a stakeholder and had been considered so by Chinese intellectuals in the preceding decades. Thus, it was not immune to the effects of a global economic downturn, considering it remained underdeveloped and fragmented in many areas. In particular, because of the lack of a centralised currency before 1934, this was an economy based on the tumultuous value of silver on the world market which affects the value of the taels and consequently, China’s external trade. On the domestic front, the 1930s also saw increased Japanese aggression in the form of its annexation of Manchuria in 1931 and military expedition into the industrial suburbs of Shanghai in January 1932, thus contributing to a sense of an overall national crisis amongst the wider public. At the same time, the handling of these crises by the Nationalist regime and its legitimacy would have been brought into scrutiny by the general population. This series of events would have also impeded many of the regime’s modernisation projects. At the same time, the national crises of the 1930s also contributed to an intensification of nationalism and popular mobilisation in the major urban centres, particularly in Shanghai, as demonstrated through the National Salvation Movement, whose rhetorics and activism also intersected with those of the National Products Movement. On another note, one could see continuity between the events of the early 1900s and the Nanjing decade in their discourses and actions in regard to commodification of nationalism and the question of state legitimacy. At the same time, the crises of the Nanjing decade also witnessed ruptures in those elements of the corresponding movements, which shall be examined in-depth throughout the remainder of this paper.
As mentioned before, the National Products Movement, throughout its existence, was not a cohesive, tightly-organised movement but rather a series of loosely-connected networks of stakeholders and rhetorics that are woven into moments of popular nationalist mobilisation, mostly concentrated in urban areas. Because of its fluidity and diversity, its rhetoric could be appropriated for different agenda by state and non-state actors alike. As suggested by Gerth, they often involved multiple, often unintended, consequences of ‘discursive categories’ due to the participation of diverse stakeholders.14 This remains a constant theme going into the 1930s.
Arguably, at the same time, the crises of the 1930s would have provided a greater sense of urgency for the participants of the Movement due to the combined threats of renewed foreign aggression from Japan and economic depression. One could see this in the retail sector, particularly in the department stores of Shanghai, where following the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the 1936 ‘Children’s City’ exhibition at Sincere department store employed nationalistic messages and the increase in the Chinese public’s interests of the border areas, as part of a ‘northwestern rush’, into their sales strategy via encouraging patriotic consumption.15 Furthermore, before the crises, the majority of manufacturing products sold at the Shanghai department stores were foreign-made, this began to change after 1931 Incident as a result of boycott of Japanese and other foreign goods where they succumbed to increased media and public pressure from advocates of both the National Salvation Movement and the National Products Movement to sell more Chinese products.16 This showed how the national crises of the 1930s saw ruptures in the activism of the National Products Movement and how intensified nationalist discourses also saw commercial opportunities for entrepreneurs.
On another note, the 1930s also saw the Nationalist government attempting to further incorporate the National Products Movement into their own modernisation project. While this has been going on since the late 1920s after Chiang’s takeover, one could argue the impact of the 1930s worldwide depression on China’s fragile economy led to a greater push from the state for consumption of domestic products as part of the economy recovery initiatives. As early as 1930, as shown in a newspaper article, there was already an awareness that China was undergoing trade depression, which would threaten the country’s ‘existence’ in the author’s words and thus requested government support and guidance. In the same piece, it also mentions the formation of a national products advocacy group led by Soong Meiling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, and other women, of which the author made the connection how the importing of women’s products contributed to China’s trade deficits. Thus, this shows how the Movement could provide opportunities for women to participate further in the public sphere, or how the state could play a role in facilitating that due to Soong’s marital connections with the highest echelon of GMD leadership. Moreover, it is also interesting to see the evoking of international examples in the case of India’s Gandhi and Ismet Pasha’s Turkey with regards to their respective ‘native products’ movements and women’s role. The mentioning of these examples would have integrated China into a wider transnational network of native products movement and its corresponding discourses. These forms of transnational connections and dialogues in terms of promotion of nationalistic consumption as part of the general struggle for self-determination in relations to China deserve greater scholarly attention in the study of the National Products Movement as a whole.
Another aspect of Nationalist rule in the 1930s which would have an impact upon the National Products Movement was the New Life Movement, promulgated in 1934. The purpose of New Life was essentially to improve and, more importantly, control the cỉtizens’ morals and behaviours based on a selected set of Confucian values, as well as to minimize the appeal of Communist ideology through promoting the GMD’s own social welfare program. One area that the movement promoted was consumption, in particular, the guidelines recommended that one should ‘eat local produce’ or when referring to clothings, ‘use domestically produced fabric.’20 Furthermore, as the emphasis of the New Life Movement regarding consumption is on ideas of ‘frugality’, this might contradict the aim of the Products Movement in promoting consumption as measures of higher material living standards.
Therefore, one could argue that the participants of the National Products Movement had to re-orientate their discourses to fit with those prescribed by the state, in which fashion is a contested area, which had much to do with the relationship between consumerism and the gender dimension. For example, at the dawn of the New Life Movement, GMD authorities condemned luxury consumerism, targeting the ‘modern girls’ as a form of enslavement to foreign influences, especially in the concessions. At the same time, Shanghai-based entrepreneurs, many of them supporters of the National Products Movement, appropriated that argument in their advertisements in terms of promoting demands for ‘national merchandise’ ( guohoa ), linking it with themes of national salvation and anti-Japanese resistance via the image of the young woman buying silken articles in the Nanjing Road. This would be similar to the shift in strategies from the department stores.
At the same time, the juxtaposing images of the female also had to do with the revival of the traditional model of the ‘wise mother and good wife’ and promotion of a modest lifestyle by the New Life Movement. This allowed for certain ‘national’ products to gain prominence in the 1930s, such as Indanthrene cloth, in which its ‘subdued elegance’ and ‘durability’ fitted the ideals of the Movement and in line with consumption of domestically-produced fabrics as shown in the advertisement.23 Furthermore, the intersection of the discourses of the New Life Movement and that of the National Products Movement also allowed further opportunities for women to participate in the public sphere. This can be seen in an article, which covered an International Women’s Day celebration organised by women’s organisations in Shanghai of which the theme was to promote the ‘Buy Chinese’ campaign. Here, one could see the connections made between the notion of ‘national salvation’ and advocating female participation in that goal via consuming more Chinese-made products and materials, even if they were ‘prevented’ from attending the aforementioned celebration, which could be interpreted as a subtle criticism of patriarchal obstruction.24 One could the argue the domestic climate of the 1930s with regards to various national crises along with the the promulgation of the New Life Movement contributed to a rupture in the National Products Movement, in which its stakeholders, be it entrepreneurs or women’s organisations, had to adapt and appropriated the ideology of the New Life to advance their own agenda whilst remain committed to the immediate aim of national salvation against foreign aggression, as well as promoting a Chinese sense of modernity via consumption. At the same time, creating opportunities for different sections of society such as women to participate in the making of an imagined national community.
One aspect of the National Products Movement that arguably flourished in the 1930s is the visualisation of national merchandises through exhibitions and fairs. This was part of the “nationalistic commodity spectacles” in state sanctioned localised emulations of the world’s fairs and great expositions of the nineteenth, which became prominent under the Goumindang administration for the purpose of demosntrating an expression of national economic unity and modernity, of which the exhibition of 1928 to commemorate the start of GMD rule was the biggest. Arguably, the national crises of the 1930s generated a sense of urgency, which increased the importance of these exhibitions as a mechanism to encourage domestic consumption and exports and ultimately, boost the process of economic recovery. Previously, most of the focus has been on the boycotts of Japanese goods to demonstrate the intensification of Chinese nationalism, whilst there has been less emphasis on more elaborate means of demonstration. From the available sources, it can be seen there was extensive coverage in the media on these exhibitions and displays, especially those outside of major urban centers such as Shanghai, in which one article from April 1934 pointed to a ‘Native Goods Exhibition’ being organised in Hangchow (modern-day Hangzhou) in order attract interests in local products, especially those made in Shanghai. At the same time, Chinese-made goods were not displayed within China but also participated in those outside of it, as with the case of the 1934 Chicago Exposition in the United States. In the press coverage of China’s presence at the Exposition, there was an incorporation of anti-Japanese discourse, in which the rationale for China’s participation was not only to promote Chinese products for foreign trade but also counter Japan’s propaganda efforts regarding the puppet state of Manchukuo which was formed after Japanese annexation of the territory.27 Thus, this would have framed the promotion of Chinese products abroad, as a significant part of the National Products Movement, within the wider campaign against Japanese aggression in the 1930s. On another note, as mentioned before, the transnational aspect of the a local movement such as the National Products Movements would be an interesting area for further research and a potential gap in the historiography of this period.
Regarding the intensification of nationalism, besides, the exhibitions also became forums for displays of public sentiments. One could point to an incident at a 1932 China National Products Exposition held in Shanghai, in which one of the speakers, who presumably would have held an important position within the GMD state apparatus, allegedly dressed in foreign-made clothes was approached by a man on the floor, which generated ‘mob anger’ and the speaker later reassured his audience his clothes had been bought before the start of ‘the agitation against foreign goods.’28 Firstly, this demonstrated the extent to which consumerism had integrated into public nationalist discourses, in which wearing foreign-made clothes would be perceived as unpatriotic. At the same time, this example also shows one of the problems associated with the National Products Movement, which is distinguishing which types of products as ‘national’ and determining origins of products. As mentioned in the article, foreign-styled clothes made of Chinese cloth were counted as ‘national products.’29 Furthermore, these kinds of incidents via state-sanctioned exhibitions of ‘national products’ also coincided with the intensification of nationalism in 1930s China in reaction to the various national crises and intersecting with movements such as the National Salvation Movement. Thus, these forms of display also became spaces for politicised expressions of sovereignty. All the more, the nature of the incident also demonstrates a link between consumption and political legitimacy in a time of crises.
To conclude, throughout its existence, despite remaining a fragmented and mostly urban phenomenon, the National Products Movement played a significant role in the historical construction of modern Chinese national consciousness through the commodification of patriotism. Whilst there were consistent themes, such as the diverse agenda of the movement’s participants, the role of the state and importance of spectacles, the sense of urgency and intensified manifestation of nationalism in reaction to the various national crises of the 1930s contributed to ruptures within the discourses of the National Product Movement. These included how the various participants of the Movement such as entrepreneurs and women appropriated the shifting political discourses such as those of the New Life Movement to serve their own agenda whilst committing to the dual project of modernisation and national salvation. At the same time, exhibitions and displays for national merchandise also became spaces for politicised expressions of national sovereignty and legitimacy in a time when those elements were perceived to be challenged by external forces. Furthermore, there still remain potential gaps in the historiography of the National Products Movement such as transnational connections and the gender dimension. On another note, through looking at these aspects of the National Products Movement in the 1930s, it would contribute to the overall re-evaluation of the Nanjing Decade and legacy of GMD rule as a whole.
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Chiang, Kai-shek. “The Guidelines of the New Life Movement.” Central Daily News, May 15, 1934.
“China’s Fight Against Japanese Aggression Extends Even to the Chicago Exposition.” The China Weekly Review (1923–1950), May 5, 1934. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chinese Newspapers Collection, 357.
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