• AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    I’m more shaky on the RoC but from my understanding there basically was no state power except sending in the military to knock heads occasionally, parts of that country were entirely run by corporations, parts of it were run by regional warlords, parts of it had functionally no government. Very few people were actually subject to the state, and the forces of capital in particular were not subject to much state power. Ownership of production, military power and state functionary tasks blended together and were often held by the same people who tended towards embracing profit motives. Although I will admit my knowledge of the RoC is limited and I might be misunderstanding.

    I mean the ROC during the Warlord Era functionally wasn’t even a state, let along a capitalist state. Unless you want to give fascism a transhistorical character (ie you want to speak of “Carolingian fascism” or call Julius Caesar a fascist), it doesn’t make sense to call ROC fascist. The understanding of Chinese academia is that the particular mode of production that China had during the Century of Humiliation, of which the Warlord Era was a latter stage of it, was semi-feudal semi-colonial. Thus, it cannot be fascist by the vast majority of Marxist definitions which explicitly specifies that the mode of production has to be capitalist. Otherwise, we can spend an eternity arguing whether Kublai Khan was fascist or whether Cyrus the Great was fascist.

    Now, if you’re talking about the ROC declaring martial law in Taiwan after getting kicked out of the Mainland by the PLA, eh. I think it’s more Bonapartist than fascist. Taiwanese finance capitalists didn’t exist at that time since Taiwan was previously a Japanese colony, and at any case, Chiang Kai-Shek wasn’t going to rely on a bunch of benshengren capitalists who collaborated with the Japanese when his power base was waishengren ex-landlords who fled with him. Chiang Kai-Shek also introduced “land reform” where he expropriated land from benshengren landlord collaborators and gave the land to waishengren landlords had their land expropriated by the the CPC.