Talk:Blue Shirts Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject China, a project to improve all China-related articles. If you would like to help improve this and other China-related articles, please join the project. All interested editors are welcome.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale. (add comments)
More information about this article... ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Secret Societies, a WikiProject which aims to improve all articles related to Secret Societies.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
Mid	This article is on a subject of mid-importance within Secret Societies articles.
This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

The article is long, but is factually incorrect and pov. The BlueShirts were created when some Nationalist officers saw Fascism as a quick way to remedy China's problems. They were mostly engaged in assasinating pro-Japan officials and communists. However, they were nowhere as efficient or as widespread as the Fascists of Europe. One thing the Kuomintang lacked was the power of mass mobilization. The article looks like it was based on Fragments of the Blue Shirt, published by the PRC. I wouldn't expect anything published in China pertaining to Republican history as npov. The book is a "historic novel" published by a 30years old non-scholar who never went to school, as stated here BlueShirts 21:16, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Your words of "I wouldn't expect anything published in China pertaining to Republican history as npov." is not NPOV itself. Please don't underestimate the intelligence and conscience of some scholars in mainland. I don't deny most of the details coming from this book. But have you read this book?Do you know how much research work this young author had done? If BBS was so clean and simple as you claim, why it was a taboo in Chinese modern history? If you don't believe in any book from mainland, why don't you read books of Professor Lloyd E.Eastman? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Giantcn (talk • contribs)

Lloyd Eastman changed his views in an article published in 1987, following the publication of several Lixingshe memoirs and one book on its history by Deng Yuanzhong. Too bad Lloyd's book Abortive Revolution doesn't reflect this change and keeps on printing the same erroneous opinion. Blueshirts 18:58, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blueshirt Reading

Johnathan D. Spence, the highly regarded China expert from Yale, characterizes the Blueshirts in his undergraduate staple, The Search for Modern China, as:

...Spearheaded by the earliest graduating classes of Whampoa cadets, to steel the political and military leadership of China for the long struggles ahead. Pledging themselves to lives of ascetic rigor, rejecting gambling, whoring or excessive consumption of food and drink, members of the group wore shirts made of coarse blue cotton, which led to their being informally named, 'Blueshirts'...Encouraged by Chiang...One theorist for the 'Blueshirts' spoke openly for their need to be like a knife, an instrument that could kill in combat or harmlessly cut vegetables...the same theorist found models for China to emulate in three societies: Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. In all three cases, he claimed, the purpose behind the slogans of national or state socialism was similar to Sun Yat Sen's Three Principles of the People. He saw democracy as a sham that could only damage a country like China, with poverty and illiterate masses. ....With a fierce loyalty to the cult of Chiang as leader, with a strong base in the administrative, military and party machinery, and with its members granted special roles in the anti-Communist campaign, the Blueshirts nucleus developed into a disciplined military and secret-police apparatus....The Blueshirt Dai Li, a Zhejiang-born Whampoa graduate, became head of Chiang Kai-sheck's Special Service Section....Initially supervising 145 operatives, by 1935 he had 1700. Dai Li was believed to have directed a number of political assasinations of those opposed to Chiang, including the head of the Chinese League for the Protection of Civil Rights (in 1933) and editor of Shanghai's leading newspaper (in 1934) (It continues with descriptions of how Blue Shirts were used to infiltrate labor groups and spy on citizens). Spence, The Search for Modern China(pp.357-358).

furthermore In March 1940 Wang Jingwei, Sun Yat Sen's former lieutenant and one time second-in-command to Chiang Kai-sheck, at last lent his prestige to the central China puppet regime-to the delight of the Japanese- by accepting the post of its ranking official. Wang's regime was afforded diplomatic recognition by the Japanese...Despite concentrated attempts by Guomintang secret agentsunder Dai Li to assasinate prominent Chinese collaborators, Wang's regime survived....

(Spence, p.439)

Barbara Tuchman in, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, refers to the Blueshirts as, "The Kuomintang's stormtroopers". (Tuchman, p.321)

The least flatteriing portrait is painted by Brian Crozier in, The Man Who Lost China (1976),(Crozier;pp.10-11)

Theodore White's Chapter in, Thunder Out Of China, "Chiang Kai-sheck-The People's Choice" does not get into the Blue Shirts per se, but he does mention the New Life ideology.

For the Sterling Seagrave treatment, you can look at pp.292-294 in The Soong Dynasty

On your long comment, all I have to say is give me a break, you're beating a dead horse. Every book on Chinese history that labels the blue shirts as "fascists" based this conclusion solely on Lloyd Eastman's article in China Quarterly. The same thing is carried over to Eastman's book Abortive Revolution. I've read many books and when you check the notes section, almost all of them cite the above work by Eastman as reference. Thus, it makes absolutely no difference at all how many references you can drum up with, because all of them are derived from the same work. After some heated discussion with Maria Chang in the China Quarterly, and particularly after the revelation and exposure of the group by former members in the 1980s, Eastman has profoundly changed his views, and this is reflected in an article published in the journal Republican China, now "Comtemporary China" I believe. Research in these areas is always changing, please. Blueshirts 03:37, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

You seem to be trying to blame Eastman for all the research on the Blueshirts. I'm sure Mr. Eastman would be flattered that he could have so much influence and the singular authority. I haven't seen his name in any of the notes. I did see a report from a magazine article from 1936. I also see a book here called "Fascism in China 1925-1938: A Documentary Study, by Michael Lestz and Cheng Pei-kai pp. 311-314. This does not seem to rely on Eastman for any "documentary evidence".

I'm trying to think of where I saw that connection...maybe in Formosa Betrayed or something

That is so much misinformation. The passage from Barbara Tuchman's book on Stilwell says the organization was founded in 1932, when in reality it was 1931 before the invasion of Manchuria. It also says they were Chiang's "storm troopers", when the influence of fascism was minimal. The entire passage also had only one passing mention on the oganization, "...leaders of group which founded the Blue Shirts, the Kuomintang's storm troopers". And the sentence itself was not referenced and carried no citation at all. And you're using this weak reference as a source to call them fascists? As for the information from Crozier's The Man Who Lost China, it's a popular history book with very little research value. Crozier is a journalist, not a historian. This is from the review of this book on Pacific Affairs (v. 51 no. 1) by James Sheridan "...the sparsity of sources shows up not only in obvious errors in Chiang's main public activities, but also in gross over-simplifications and errors in his treatment of the political context". The only good thing about this book is that it was the first English biography about Chiang's entire life, but carries too many mistakes and too little analysis for the specialist, especially in an area as complicated as the blue shirts. The same thing can be said for "Soong Dynasty" and this popular history books, which are good the the general readership, but probably would get a graduate student marked for his use in his term paper. And I'm surprised that Eastman was not mentioned as he was the head guy in creating this notion in western scholarship, with his seminal article in the China Quarterly in 1972, as most previous sources that called the blue shirts fascists were Japanese intelligence propaganda aiming to undermine Chinag's negotiations during the pre-war period. And the 1991 book by Eastman was not a new book, it was a collection of essential chapters from the Cambridge History of China. It does not reflect any changes in his views due to his discussions with various historians and former members of the group. Seriously, I hope you don't make this kind out-of-context edits and quote mining on any of the articles you make on wikipedia, and maybe find better specialist sources than general history books that you find in barnes-and-nobles. Blueshirts 04:37, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unusual emphasis on minor past event

Respectfully I comment such minor historical detail such as Blue Shirts Society is not requiring of such efforts and comprehensive treatments on the Wikipedia Project. Wen Hsing 04:45, 26 September 2007 (UTC)