Cold War Taiwan and the Refashioning of Chinese Anticommunism

This paper zeros in on canonized additions to Sun Yat-sen’s minshengprinciple, which has been rendered into English as either people’s livelihood or, more provocatively, socialism. It explores the circumstances that compelled Chiang Kai-shek and his Guomindang regime, then resettled into Taipei, to add “supplementary chapters” on cultivation and leisure to minshengin 1953, even though conservative interpretations of Sun’s unfinished speeches on the topic emerged as early as the mid-1920s amidst the party’s struggle against communism in mainland China. It argues that while attempts to neutralize radical implications of minsheng sprouted in the 1920s, it was only in the 1950s, when “Free China” redefined itself as a reformist, welfare state that “supplements” to minsheng became necessary. As the Guomindang recalibrated its ideological agendas in relation to Cold War geopolitical priorities and reconciled its inability to effect drastic changes under a world order controlled by Euroamerican powers, minsheng became a safe, developmentalist ideal, one that promised a good life without disrupting global and domestic power relations. The 1953 “supplements” to minsheng constituted, in addition, a response to the apparent moderation of the Maoist China, whose “New Democracy” order frustrated the stark dichotomy between the capitalist “free” world and a Soviet-dominated communist bloc. This paper sheds light on a major but understudied instance of how interwar and wartime anticommunism in China was repackaged for early Cold War purposes.