Air War and Fascist Politics in 1930s China

In January 1932, the Empire of Japan bombed the city of Shanghai, making China one of the first countries to experience the destructive reach of aerial bombing. In response, the Nationalist Party government and technical experts began articulating a logic of “total war” (quanmian zhanzheng or quanmin zhanzheng), not only as an idea of war enveloping the populations and productive capacities of entire countries, but as a government rationality for maintaining society as a material and biological unity, expressed through sciences like air defense (fangkong), city planning, and architecture. A style of “political existentialism,” in which the survival of the political community trumped all other concerns, legitimated this mode of government.

Defense against bombing, total war, and political existentialism developed together. Connecting three moments of destruction—the bombing of Shanghai in 1932, the bombing of Chongqing in 1939 and 1940, and the Chongqing Grand Tunnel disaster in 1941—I argue it became increasingly possible to imagine China risked physical extinction. As a result, militarists, technocrats, and right-wing Nationalists began to conceive of China as an organic unity for whom the supreme political value was brute existence, instead of a national community devoted to preserving values or developing the economy for common prosperity. Rather than arguing for existential realities or hard truths beyond the realm of reason and values, however, political existentialism in China sought to enshrine the transcendent authority of expertise so bureaucrats, air-defense experts, and architects could preserve the national war machine without regard for political negotiation, instituting a dictatorship of instrumental reason.