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Ends of the Universal: The League of Nations and Chinese Fascism on the Eve of World War II*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2013

MAGGIE CLINTON
MAGGIE CLINTON*
Affiliation:
Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, USA05753 Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Fascist Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and the League of Nations’ handling of the crisis resonated strongly in Nationalist China, where it recalled the League's failure to thwart Japan's claims to Manchuria in 1931. As these two crises unfolded, the League became a nexus around which Nationalist Party debates about the position of colonized and semi-colonized countries within the extant world order crystallized. Party adherents reflected on China's and Ethiopia's positions as independent nation states with limited territorial integrity or juridical autonomy, and assessed this situation in light of their respective League memberships. While party liberals continued to view the League as a flawed but worthwhile experiment in global governance, newly-emerged fascist activists within the party denounced it as an instrument for curtailing the sovereignty of weak nations. From these conflicting views of the League, it can be discerned how Nationalist disunity was partially grounded in disagreements over the nature and ideal structure of the global order, and how Chinese fascists agitated to escape from modern structures of imperialist domination while reiterating the latter's racial and civilizational exclusions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 1740 - 1768
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The author thanks Rebecca Karl, Manu Goswami, Andrew Sartori, Mary Nolan, Harry Harootunian, Quinn Slobodian, Joyce Mao, Sasha Disko, Roger White, Naomi Schiller, and the anonymous reviewers for their exacting feedback on this paper as it transformed from a dissertation chapter into its present form.

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32 In a speech before the Oxford China Society, Victor Hoo observed that the ‘the signatories and the adherents [of the Nine Power Treaty] definitely committed themselves to the twin principles of territorial and administrative integrity of China and equality of opportunity for the trade of all nations in China’. Victor Chi-tsai Hoo, untitled speech, p. 2 [Box 1, Folder 1.8]. Victor Chi-tsai Hoo Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

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36 As Yang Yongxing has noted, the Blue Shirts often vocalized their disagreement with Chiang Kai-shek's policy decisions in the pages of their own publications. Yang, ‘Lixingshe Views of Japan’, p. 199.

37 Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism, p. 128.

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63 Ibid.

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71 Mo Deng, ‘Yi-A Zhanzhengguo jiangwei dazhan daohuoxian hu?’, pp. 384, 386.

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82 Ibid.

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85 Ibid., p. 23.

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