The Birthplace of Wrapping Authoritarianism in Confucian Culture

7-1: The Whampoa Faction

Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 in Xikou, Fenghua, Zhejiang, into a small-town merchant family. His father died early, and he was raised by his mother. In 1906, he entered the Baoding Army Preparatory School, and later went to Tokyo’s Shimbu Gakko and the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, receiving modern military education. While in Japan, he came into contact with Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui and joined the revolutionary movement. After the Xinhai Revolution broke out in 1911, Chiang returned to participate in the recovery of Shanghai. His military career afterward was marked by turbulence.

In 1923, he was appointed by Sun Yat-sen as president of the Whampoa Military Academy, where he gradually built a loyal power base within the Nationalist military structure. The Whampoa clique became the foundation of his authority, and the prototype of a “party-army unity” was born. In 1926, he led the Northern Expedition, quickly capturing Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Nanjing, and Shanghai, becoming the most powerful figure within the Kuomintang (KMT).

Chiang received Japanese-style modern military training early on, which emphasized absolute obedience, strict discipline, and organizational efficiency. He admired the willpower of strongmen and authoritarian control, rather than consensus politics or grassroots autonomy. At Whampoa, he promoted a model where military officers were also political cadres, using militarized methods to reform political structures.

The full name of the academy was the “Republic of China Army Officer Academy,” founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1924, with Chiang as president, located on Whampoa Island in Guangzhou. The academy’s motto stressed “revolution, loyalty, and sacrifice,” and more important than tactical training was political indoctrination and absolute loyalty to leadership. Interestingly, political classes were taught not by generals but by Communists—figures like Zhou Enlai, Yun Daiying, and Lin Boqu served as political instructors. Chiang focused on military discipline and daily training, gradually consolidating personal authority.

Within the Whampoa system, an officer had to meet two core criteria: military competence—command, combat, obedience—and political loyalty, specifically to the KMT, and in practice, to Chiang himself. This logic later expanded throughout the National Revolutionary Army: officers had to be party members, senior commanders were often Whampoa graduates, forming the “Whampoa clique.” The army embedded party guidance systems and secret police mechanisms to ensure “ideological purity.”

“Ideological purity” primarily meant total adherence to KMT ideology—more precisely, absolute loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek. No traces of communism, liberalism, social democracy, or independent nationalism were tolerated. One had to believe unconditionally in the Three Principles of the People. Whampoa’s curriculum included propaganda of Chiang’s thought, party doctrine, and political screening was required for promotions, party admission, and academy entry. A culture of denunciation flourished: informants, secret agents, mutual surveillance. Being accused of “impure thinking”—dissatisfaction with Chiang, communist contacts, or reading banned literature—could lead to demotion, imprisonment, or even execution.

In this regard, the system bore a striking resemblance to the Communist Party’s own emphasis on ideological conformity. In both, loyalty to the organization superseded personal beliefs. Ideology was not just internal—it was a political position.

Chiang did not stop at Whampoa. This model spread across the entire KMT structure. Party affairs were arranged on military lines: vertical hierarchy, no democratic deliberation. Grassroots organizations focused on command, obedience, and criticism sessions, lacking any autonomous initiative. The propaganda system mimicked military orders to craft slogans, campaigns, and mass mobilization.

While this militarized political cadre system did enhance short-term efficiency, discipline, and organizational strength—helping Chiang unify southern China and achieve success in the Northern Expedition—it had deep flaws. It lacked political inclusiveness, crushed dissent, and bred internal factionalism. It also obstructed the institutionalization of the party: without independent oversight, the party became a military appendage. Once military defeats occurred—as in the Civil War—the party collapsed with it. This explains why, after 1949, the KMT survived in Taiwan but never regained political vitality, turning instead into a detached elite power group.

7-2: The Central Club Clique

The “Central Club” was founded in 1927 in Nanjing. On the surface, it was a youth organization discussing national policy, but in reality, it functioned as a covert system for internal intelligence, surveillance, mobilization, and appointments within the KMT. It was established by brothers Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu, Chiang’s most loyal civilian aides—hence the name “CC Clique.” Though not a formal government body, it held real power: deciding who could join the party, who could rise, who must be purged, and which ideas were allowed to circulate.

The Central Club controlled key departments of the KMT: the Central Organization Department, Personnel Department, Ministry of Education, etc. It appointed local party leaders and dispatched inspectors to enforce “purity.” It also controlled media and publishing, and spearheaded the “New Life Movement,” promoting the Confucian-style virtues of cleanliness, propriety, loyalty, and shame. They waged ideological war against communism, liberalism, and Western thought. The use of Confucian wrapping for authoritarianism—this too came from the KMT.

The founders, Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu, were called Chiang’s right and left hands. Guofu was stern, good at enforcing discipline and creating bureaucratic rules; Lifu was eloquent, skilled in writing and propaganda, and led the cultural, educational, and ideological sectors. They excelled at using traditional language to cloak modern control tactics: personal worship of Chiang became filial loyalty; purges became moral rectification; ideological monopoly became “unified thought” and “party unity.”

Their people controlled the party’s personnel, organization, education, and propaganda networks. Through training, appointments, and placement, they built their own network, with Central Club branches in various provinces, becoming the nerve centers of local governments. In the education system, they enforced total party control: university professors required party training, textbooks had to pass ideological reviews, and youth military camps and political institutes trained the next generation of KMT ideological cadres.

The “New Life Movement,” launched personally by Chiang in 1934, was a nationwide social reform campaign aimed at restoring moral discipline and political order amid rising communist agitation and deepening class tensions. It was a conservative response to a crisis of legitimacy.

In the early 1930s, China faced communist insurgency calling for land redistribution, widespread social chaos—addiction, gambling, sex trade, urban lawlessness—rising anti-Japanese sentiment but disorganized public, and low army morale. The KMT’s rule was shaky. Militarily, Chiang waged anti-Communist campaigns; culturally, he launched a top-down spiritual rectification movement.

The core slogans were “Propriety, Righteousness, Integrity, Shame—the four pillars of the nation” and “Loyalty, Filial Piety, Benevolence, Love, Trust, Justice, Harmony, Peace—the eight virtues of personhood.” Specific demands included: neat clothing, no exposure or eccentric outfits; no spitting or littering; no gambling or playing mahjong; thrift and obedience to traffic rules; no backdoor favors or corruption; proper gender behavior, with bans on premarital sex, adultery, prostitution; opposition to laziness, consumerism, individualism. Within families, it stressed paternal authority, male dominance, filial piety, and virtuous widowhood.

Frankly, I violated almost all of these—except prostitution. What seemed like moral preaching was in fact a state-led intrusion into personal life, down to the body and daily habits.

Enforcement began in the military, with daily inspections of dress and behavior, then spread to schools—with textbooks, lectures, and New Life societies. In cities, police collaborated with “New Life Inspectors” to monitor clothing, mahjong, and even public displays of affection.

Although it wore the robes of tradition, the New Life Movement was highly modern in execution, even resembling contemporary European far-right movements: glorifying order, discipline, nationalism; rejecting liberalism and individualism; promoting collectivism, sacrifice, and purity. Through rituals, slogans, uniforms—it sought to unify public consciousness. I have to admit, I would have been deemed utterly impure back then. No wonder my aunt once told me I had “no upbringing.” And according to her standard, I probably didn’t—after all, I once left slippers next to a treadmill I had brought to her place. Apparently, that too was an unforgivable breach of decorum.

While the New Life Movement did bring some short-lived cleanliness and order to cities, people generally found it stifling and oppressive. Underground comics and satire flourished. But it solved none of the real problems—poverty, corruption, repression, inequality. In stark contrast, the Communists were mobilizing peasants with land reform in the countryside—offering an entirely different political possibility.