Chapter 4 illustrates the developments of the trends originated in the late Qing in support for state intervention on the economic and how they came to influence the political thought of the 1920s and 1930s. These trends led to economic solutions that tended to marginalize the market, including Jiang Jieshi’s New Life Movement (1935) – a fascist vision of frugal modernity – and various projects of economic cooperation (the Cooperative Society Movement). This period witnessed an intensification of the tension between treaty-port consumerist trends and economic decline in the rural hinterland, as well as that between the nation-building perspective of the state – which focused on developing the country as a whole – and the treaty port-based view of consumerist modernity. In addition, an escalating sense of crisis and need of decisive action to save the nation from the mounting threat from Japanese expansionist imperialism brought to a special admiration of fascist models of “controlled economy” (tongzhi jingji) such as Italy, Germany, and Japan.