New Life Movement, The Political And Social Analysis

The New Life Movement was started by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934 to restructure the old moral values and change the social climate. In the meantime, he launched continuous encirclement and suppression to resist the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and implemented cultural encirclement and suppression in the Kuomintang areas. Actually,its essence is that Chiang Kai-shek clique tried to seek solutions from traditional Confucian thoughts and restructure ideology in order to solve the problem of the legitimacy of political rule and gain more political identity to strengthen their own political domination.Political socialization theories focus on how social members change from a natural person into a political one. Through the political culture study and dissemination, the social individual can attain values prevailing in political system, obtain political cognition, political emotion, political attitude and political inclination, follow the rules of the political system and perform the roles specified by the political system to get legitimacy for the political system and maintain the existing political order accordingly.The thesis analyzes the New Life Movement advocated by Chiang Kai-shek clique from the perspective of political socialization and expounds the content of propaganda and the way of implementation. The purpose of Chiang Kai-shek clique to carry out the New Life Movement was to obtain political identify and enhance the legitimacy of political rule. In order to achieve this purpose, Chiang Kai-shek clique restructured the political ideology, mixed traditional Confucian thoughts, the reformed Three People's Principles (Nationalism, Democracy, the People's Livelihood) and Fascism composition, divided the whole society into political elites and the masses who were respectively supposed to be the object of political socialization, emphasized one-way political culture implant, ignoring the two-way interaction between the political subject and object.The foreword briefly introduces the thesis's purpose, significance and the current research situation home and abroad. Chapter one: the summary of the New Life Movement. This part describes the cause, main content, the process of implementation and the evaluation of the effect of the New Life Movement.Chapter two: the review of the New Life Movement in terms of political socialization. This part mainly applies those theories related to political socialization to analyze the purpose, the subject and the object, the content and the implementing way of the New Life Movement, elaborating the reason for the failure of Chiang Kai-shek clique's attempt to restructure ideology and the problems existed in the way of implementation.Chapter three: Enlightenment on the current political socialization by the New Life Movement. It is suggested that we should pay attention to the establishment of the related subject such as the economic development and social development in the content; we should emphasize the combination of school education and the mass media publicity in approaches; we should be expert in combining explicit and implicit education in way. The Conclusion summarizes the thesis in short.