Ideological Quest in Nationalist China: Kemalism and the “New Life Movement
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38154/CJAS.2025.91Keywords:
China, Chiang Kai-shek, New Life Movement, RPP, Kemalism.Abstract
In this study, firstly, the culture policies implemented by Chiang Kai-Shek who the leader of the authoritarian-nationalist single-party government in the Republic of China, under the name of "New Life Movement" were examined. Seeking a new path for China in which outside the existing political systems in the Western world, Chiang examined Kemalism and the Republican People's Party (RPP) as examples and drew attention to the connections between his own ideas and Kemalism. The administrators of these republican regimes sought modernization formulas that were suitable for their own historical conditions, and the Chinese leadership saw Kemalism as the ideology closest to themselves. The interest of the Guomingdang (GMD) to the RPP inclueded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in the person of Mao Zedong, into the discussion of Kemal Atatürk and Kemalism.
In this article, Chiang Kai-shek's political-cultural manner and writings on the citizen project are examined together with the objections of Mao, accompanied by the visits of the representatives of the Republic of China to Turkey and the "Turkey and RPP instructions" conveyed to them by the GMD center, and discussed in comparison with RPP policies in Atatürk's period.
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