This chapter first explores how the CYP mobilized radicalized Chinese youths to take part in its violent actions. Subsequently, it explores the CYP’s successes and failures in its military operations through its earlier attempt to found a party army, as well as through its Anti-Japanese guerrilla wars, its uprising in west Hunan, and its participation in the Fujian rebellion. By so doing, this chapter highlights that the CYP founders were not simply intellectuals using the pen as their weapon, but also fought with guns when they strove to materialize their national socialist beliefs. As a result, the CYP also stood out as a distinct revolutionary force representing the radical right in the stage of China’s mass party politics.

As the conclusion of this book, I highlight the CYP as a strong historical reference for those wishing to understand the historical evolution of the ideological perceptions and practices of the radical right in the twentieth century. First, I look at the Chinese political right in the early twentieth-century world, ideologically formed in the wake of the Great War. I also discuss the political right in twentieth-century China through a comparison with the short-lived Blue Shirts of the GMD in the 1930s and the right-turning CCP of Contemporary China. Finally, I highlight the CYP’s political fate in the post-1949 years with a brief reflection on the present day as final remarks of this book.

Despite the intensified Chinese nationalism in the Resistance War, ironically the CYP leaders found their radical nationalism lost its solid support in Chinese society. Furthermore, the CYP also lost its dominant influence in Sichuan, resulting in significant political weakening in its struggle with the GMD and the CCP. It was in this context the CYP began to deradicalize. This chapter examines this sudden change and discusses in four sections how the CYP reached “Roosevelt” from “Mussolini.” The first section examines how the CYP unrevolutionized as both the international and internal situations forced the CYP to accommodate more liberalist politics. The second section documents the CYP’s contribution to forming and splitting the Chinese Democratic League in its struggles with the CCP and the GMD. The third section delineats the inter-party relations between the CYP and GMD in the mid-1940s. Finally, the fourth section explores the CYP’s collaboration and competition with the GMD in both state and local elections for the National Assembly and Legislative and Control Yuans between 1947 and 1948.

This chapter reconsiders the radicalization process of the May Fourth youth through the founding of the CYP in Europe and the collapse of the YCA in China. This chapter first highlights how the different material conditions in Europe laid a significant foundation for the emergence of different ideologies among those Chinese students working and studying in Europe. Subsequently, by examining the radicalizing political confrontations between the founders of the CCP and CYP in both Europe and China, this chapter demonstrates how the CYP founders became radicalized and set out for a national socialist revolution in 1923.

What does “radical right” mean in China? If it is difficult to understand its meaning in the political discourse of twenty-first century China (as the current CCP regime claims to represent the left and the liberalist forces the right), we could understand it as an enduring ideology specific to the Chinese context in the Republican era. In particular, the Chinese Youth Party with its version of national socialism can be a good lens through which to view this ideology. Incorporating my interview with Mrs. Zhao Yusheng, a minor member of the CYP, I define the “radicalness” and the “right-ness” of the CYP first, and then discuss its historical and historiographical importance in the making and unmaking of the Chinese radical right from the early 1920s to late 1940s.

This chapter explores the ideas and political movements of the CYP in warlord China through three sections. The first section characterizes the CYP’s ideology by its cultural conservatism, political intellectualism, and integral nationalism based on a combination of transformed federalism and corporatism specific to the Chinese sociopolitical context, particularly through the ideological debates of the CYP founders with Communists between 1924 and 1927. The second section delves into the CYP’s mass political movements of different types. Finally, as a precondition for the CYP’s rapid development in north China and Manchuria, the third section explores how the CYP created friendly political environments by collaborating with leading regional warlords in different periods.

This chapter examines the CYP’s local construction in Sichuan between 1926 and 1937. Through its organization of the students and teachers in educational circles, its work with local gentry through the case of the Relief Committee (Anfu weiyuanui), and its quest for the support of local warlords, this chapter highlights the CYP’s successful local operations in Sichuan in this period. By so doing, this chapter helps readers understand the regional variations of China’s state construction during the Republican era.

The CYP founders were at one time inclined to the anarchist social revolution, widely debated during the May Fourth era in the late 1910s. Contrary to the Communist members in the Young China Association, however, they turned to national socialism in the wake of the May Fourth.This chapter traces the early journeys of Zeng Qi and Li Huang from Sichuan, Chen Qitian and Yu Jiaju from Hubei, and Zuo Shunsheng from Hunan as May Fourth youths, and highlights on what ideological grounds they reached out again to Zhang Taiyan and Liang Qichao for spiritual guidance in the early 1920s. In opposition to current historiography, this chapter does not discuss the May Fourth as a significant rupture, but rather takes it as bridge to the rise of the Chinese radical right, establishing a nationalist “Confucian China” out of the civilizational “Confucian China.”