國家社會主義在東亞的興起：北洋時期安福政權與西原龜三群體

Date(s)： 2026/01/16

Time： 15:00~17:00

Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall

Host： Prof. Lin Chih-hung（Associate research fellow, IMH, AS）

Speaker：Dr. 梁明德（香港理工大學博士後研究員）

Organizer： History of Knowledge Research Group

Abstract,
The talk concerns a “State Socialist Phase” in East Asia developmentalism, emerging from the 1890s and maturing by 1940. I contend that the political and economic trajectory of China and modern East Asia was decisively shaped during WWI under the influence of the Anfu Regime and Nishihara’s State Socialist vision.
"Strategy for Economic Stare-Building", authored by Nishihara Kamezo and his circle under Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake, promoted economic Pan-Asianism with the goal of a collective East Asian economic uprising against Western “core nations.” Although their proposals were not enacted, Nishihara’s manifesto pioneered ideas around national income “growthism” and “rationalization”.
The 1918 “Nishihara Moment” reflected unusual Sino-Japanese economic alignment. Nishihara proposed a “Marshall Plan” for China and envisioned an “East Asian Economic League” with a Bretton Woods–style currency system. Domestically, Japan was to undertake land reform, collectivize agriculture, and replace the traditional merchant class with a state-managed unified purchase and marketing system.
Nishihara’s ideas were influenced by Euro-American thinkers like Friedrich List, Otto von Bismarck, and WWI-era German economic mobilization. Nishihara forms a bridge between Meiji social reformers and the 1930s “Reform Bureaucrats,” whose technocratic legacy shaped Japan and Korea’s mid-20th-century policies.
Uniquely, Nishihara incorporated Chinese industrial bureaucrats’ aims, highlighting an overlooked tradition of State Socialism in China — a continuity from late-Manchu reforms through socialist transformation in the 1950s. This technocratic centrality in economic policy is often eclipsed by more visible revolutionary forces. This necessitates a reevaluation.
Central to this is reassessing China's Anfu Regime (1917-20), which has long held a negative reputation, blamed for launching China’s warlord era. Since the 1980s, historians have rehabilitated many previously maligned Republican figures, yet Anfu remains singularly condemned.