Editing New Life Movement (section)

== Reception ==
Despite the grandiose goal of revitalising and revolutionising China, the New Life Movement ultimately ended in failure as both domestic and foreign reception remained paltry throughout the duration of the movement. The combination of the movement's inability to formulate a systematic ideology and the seeming banality of its concerns caused both Chinese and foreign commentators to ignore the significance of New Life ideology and intentions and instead to stress the more superficial aspects of the movement. Consequently, the movement was approached variously as a joke, or to those taking it more seriously, a shallow and antiquated regression to Chinese tradition when tradition had already proved incapable of solving China's problems.<ref name=":3">Arif Dirlik. "The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution."&nbsp;''The Journal of Asian Studies'', vol. 34, no. 4, 1975, p. 946, www.jstor.org/stable/2054509.</ref> Historian Suzy Kim summarizes its failure as due to a "lack of cohesion."<ref name=":1" /> 

The Movement's inability to formulate a systematic ideology and abstract code of ethics contrasted sharply with the promises of the Communists, who spoke sharply and to the point on taxation, distribution of land and the disposition of overlords.<ref>Emily Hahn,&nbsp;''The Soong Sisters,&nbsp;''(Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), 182.</ref> From the perspective of some impoverished Chinese citizens, the policies of Marxists were far more practical and coherent, leading to the lack of significance attributed to the New Life Movement. On a Western perspective, Chiang's complex code of ethics was far too abstract and lacking in action to be useful or pragmatic, perceived as being superficial and inordinately idealistic. &nbsp;

The lack of popular domestic reception is exacerbated by the behaviour of the [[Blue Shirts Society|Blue Shirts]], a far-right fascist group that enforced the rules of the New Life Movement. Historian [[Sterling Seagrave]] writes "by 1936, the Blue Shirts were running amok, driven by excesses of zeal and brutality, giving the New Life Movement a bad name".&nbsp;The Literary Digest&nbsp;observed that year, 'Most likely to upset the teacups were Chiang's own civilian, anti-foreign, bombing, stabbing, shooting 'Blue Shirt' terrorists, who once useful, now unmanageable, have become something of a Frankenstein monster."<ref>&nbsp;Sterling Seagrave,&nbsp;''The Soong Dynasty,&nbsp;''(New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1985), 294.</ref> The association of the violent and repressive behaviour of the Blue Shirts compounded the less than enthusiastic reception of the Movement, further attributing to it a negative reputation as well.

Other historians assert that the New Life Movement was not without its merits and positive values either, although they also concede it was not able to offset the KMT's painstaking struggle to resolve China's deep-rooted and complex socioeconomic problems.

According to [[Jonathan Fenby]], "Many New Life rules were eminently sensible, such as those advocating healthy living, cleanliness, vaccination, and the killing of flies and mosquitoes. Compared to attempts to re-educate and dragoon the Chinese people by Chiang's Communist successor, the movement was positively benign. But, in a country with problems on the scale of those faced by China, the initiative was like the admonitions of a frustrated father wagging his finger at his unruly children. The message never reached the bulk of illiterate peasants, who were, in any case, more concerned with survival than with wearing their hats straight. Being told to eat in silence and go to bed early could only make the modern-minded urban elite regard the regime as a bunch of petty busybodies." Fenby also notes that modern-day China itself has also tried similar government-sponsored efforts to encourage the Chinese people to "behave better", citing the Public Morality Day of autumn 2003 as "a loud echo of the New Life movement."<ref>{{cite book|first=Jonathan|last=Fenby|title=Chiang Kai Shek - China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=s2NKutuUlA8C&q=new%20life%20rules|year=2008|publisher=OUP Oxford|page=14|isbn=9780786739844}}</ref>

[[Rana Mitter]] commented that, "Despite its anti-communism, it shared many values and assumptions with the CCP, with its stress on [[frugality]] and [[Collectivism and individualism|collective values]]. Yet it never had much success. While China suffered from a massive agricultural and fiscal crisis, prescriptions about clothes and orderly behaviour did not have much popular traction." He also asserted that contemporary China has consciously or not imitated many aspects of the New Life Movement in recent years, pointing to Chinese society, where points are given by local committees to residents who throw away their
garbage and put out plants to decorate their houses. In the run-up to the Olympics, Beijing residents were told of a new 'morality evaluation index' which would give credit for 'displays of patriotism, large book collections, and balconies full of potted plants' and lower grades for 'alcohol abuse, noise complaints, pollution, or a violation of licences covering internet cafes and karaoke parlours'. Public toilets in tourist areas are also being upgraded and star-rated."<ref>{{cite book|first=Rana|last=Mitter|title=Modern China: A Very Short Introduction|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=a2oniV1AZ9QC&q=new%20life%20movement%20China|year=2008|publisher=OUP Oxford|page=95|isbn=9780802143228}}</ref>

Jay Taylor argues that Chiang's motives for launching the New Life Movement were overall understandable given China's dire situation at the time, even if it did not achieve the results that many had hoped or imagined, nor did Chiang really seek to use the Movement itself to engage in imperialism, but to address legitimately overwhelming issues in Chinese society: "The values that the movement sought to inculcate were mostly simple neo-Confucian merits and traditional [[Japan|Japanese]] habits—frugality and conscience, simplicity, honesty, and even promptness, hygiene, and neatness. For critics,
the disturbing aspect of the movement was its intention to "thoroughly militarize the lives of the citizens of the entire nation." Yet the purpose of this
"complete militarization" was not to conquer other people but to cultivate "courage and swiftness, the endurance of suffering, a tolerance of hard work,
especially the habit and ability of unified action." The aim was to say "farewell to yesterday's barbarian way of life, its disorderliness, lethargy, and depression." These were hardly objectionable goals, especially when framed in the innocent bromides of Confucius and Christ." He also notes that Chiang  developed deep personal reservations regarding the Blue Shirts, having mused in a letter to the newspaper '''[[Ta Kung Pao|Dagongbao]]'', "How would I differ from the Communists...if I were to imitate the so-called fascists...of Italy?" and by mid-1934, had become "thoroughly disillusioned with the organization". Unlike the Brown Shirts, who numbered two million and functioned as Hitler's private paramilitary around the same time period, the exclusive Blue Shirts had only about three hundred official members when it finally disbanded in 1938.<ref>{{cite book|first=Jay|last=Taylor|title=The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7Kz111Lie-0C&q=new%20life%20movement%20inculcate|year=2009|publisher=Harvard University Press|page=108|isbn=9780674033382}}</ref>

Federica Ferlanti notes that for all its shortcomings, the New Life Movement was nevertheless able to help rally considerable number of ordinary Chinese people to the [[Second Sino-Japanese War|anti-Japanese war effort]], particularly [[urbanite]] Chinese women, who in one instance helped raise an "extraordinary amount of money during the New Life Movement Fifth Anniversary fund-raising campaign of 1939." She further states that "the involvement of civil servants through the New Life Movement wartime campaigns prevented the disintegration of society and administrative institutions under the impact of the war in the first phase of the conflict" and that in conclusion, "the complex network of New Life Movement organisations in the administrative structure helped stabilise the Nationalist state during the first years of the war, and the involvement of civil servants tempered the centrifugal drifting of the administrative institutions."<ref>[https://ccposters.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ferlanti.pdf The New Life Movement at War: Wartime Mobilisation and State Control in Chongqing and Chengdu, 1938—1942 European Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2012), pp. 187-212]</ref>