The politics of depoliticization in Republican China

This study complements the scholarship on Chinese student political activism by focusing on how the ruling Guomindang viewed the issue and formulated its response from 1927 to 1949. Basically, a set of restrictive regulations governing student unions was imposed and served as the core of its student policy. It was, however, a two-pronged approach, involving also ideological indoctrination, political cultivation of student loyalists, and even a party youth wing. Hence, it was a strategy of depoliticization with politics never out of the picture. A substantial part of the book analyses the Guomindang Youth Corps, adding significant details to the pioneering studies of Lloyd Eastman and enhancing our understanding of its role. Research on this work was conducted primarily at the Guomindang Archives in Taiwan and the Nanjing Second Historical Archives in mainland China.