The Making of the “Blue Shirts”: Political Labelling and Press Circulation in Republican China, 1932–1943

This article examines how “Blue Shirts” [藍衣社] was made and remade as a political label through press circulation in Republican China. Rather than assuming that each occurrence referred to a stable organisation, it analyses a recoverable inventory of 36 press records from the original research materials, supplemented by 36 records located through a separate public-source search, while distinguishing inspected pages, transcriptions, bibliographical records, and unresolved references. Close readings trace the label’s association with the Lixingshe [力行社] and its extension to other Nationalist actors during 1932–1936, followed by its reuse in Japanese and collaborationist reporting during 1938–1943. Comparisons of attributed news-agency reports in 1938 and 1939 show how shared dispatches acquired different headlines and political judgements, while a 1942 exposé documents the label’s movement between news and other print genres. In the passages analysed, “Blue Shirts” generally functions as an externally applied and often hostile designation whose referents shift across political and media settings. Uneven source coverage does not support claims about overall peaks in press reporting. The inspected occupation-era publications nevertheless continued to circulate the name after institutional reorganisation. The article therefore shifts attention from presumed organisational continuity to the ways circulation, attribution, and political accusation made shifting referents publicly intelligible.