Kita Ikki and Zeng Qi: National Socialism in East Asia, Late 1910s–Early 1930s

This article explores emergent radical political discourse in East Asia driven, at least partially, by regionalized national socialism, which was one of the two most influential revolutionary ideologies, alongside communism, in the early twentieth-century world. Despite a wealth of scholarship about national struggles and communist movements in the political radicalization of East Asia from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, it is still difficult to understand the role national socialism played in this radicalization, as seen in the ascendance of Kita Ikki and Zeng Qi, the two leading national socialists in Japan and China in this era. By comparing Kita’s and Zeng’s transformative ideas, this article documents radical discursive changes.