The neoliberal state and risk society: The Chinese State and the Middle Class

Telos

Volumn 2010, Issue 151, 2010, Pages 105-128

  Ren, Hai ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 79956163788     PISSN: 00906514     EISSN: 1940459X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3817/0610151105     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000);
2. and Paolo Virno, a Grammar of the Multitude: For an analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans., Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004).
3. Hardt and Negri, empire, p. 100.
4. Virno, a Grammar of the Multitude, p. 21. This issue is not only subjective but also objective. For example, as Jean-Luc Nancy points out, "the unique and incommensurable emergence of a singularity, an absolute, singular sense," associated with the multitude, is obviously "not measurable in terms of any signification of 'rights' and 'freedoms'," which are associated with the modern nation-state. See his The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 114.
5. Alain Badiou, being and event, trans. Oliver Felltham (London: Continuum, 2001), "Mediations" 8 and 9, pp. 93-111.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford. CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), chap. 1.
7. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 27-28, quotation on p. 5.
8. See Michael Marder's discussion of Schmitt's theory of the political in "Carl Schmitt and the Risk of the Political," Telos 132 (Fall 2005): 5-21.
9. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 297-98.
10. See V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917; New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
11. Quoted in Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 312.
12. Michael Dutton points out that Mao's distinction between the enemy and the friend in Chinese revolutionary practices came from Lenin and was originally influenced by Carl Schmitt's theory on the political. See Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001). That distinction was expressed as one between the capitalists and the proletariat.
13. Mao Tsetung, "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," available online at the From Marx to Mao website, at http://www.marx2mao.com/ Mao/PDD49.html.
14. See Renmin ribao (People's daily), May 16, 2000, p. 1.
15. For an in-depth analysis of this process, see Hai Ren, Neoliberalism and Culture in China and Hong kong: The Countdown of Time (London: Routledge, 2010).
16. Aihwa Ong argues that special economic zones and their expansion have created a phenomenon called graduated sovereignty, meaning that in these zones, populations are governed by techniques and laws different from those used in non-special economic zones and their expanded areas. See her Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), especially chaps. 3-4.
17. See the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television special on "China's Vast Consumer Class," October 5, 2005. The show's transcript is available at the PBS website, at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july- dec05/consumers-10-05.html.
18. Joseph Kahn, "China's Elite Learn to Flaunt It While the New Landless Weep," The New york Times, December 21,2004.
19. Yu Wenlie, "Jingji lujing de zhexue sikao [A philosophical thinking on the direction of the economy]," in Wu Yifeng, Ding Bing, and Li Zhong, eds., kaifangxia de hongguan jingji yu qiye lilun yanjiu [Macro economy under opening and enterprise Studies] (Beijing: Zhongguo Jingjin Chubanshe, 2004), p. 20.
20. Here, risk is both real and imagined in relation to the future of the state. The concept of risk society draws on Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992);
21. Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, individualization: institutionalized individualism and its Social and Political Consequences (London: SAGE, 2002);
22. and Scott Lash, "Reflexivity as Non-linearity," Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2003): 49-17.
23. See Chaohua Wang, ed., one China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003),
24. especially Yi Wang, "From Status to Contract?" pp. 189-97;
25. Changping Li, "The Crisis in the Countryside," pp. 198-218;
26. and Xuehui Xiao, "Industrializing Education?" pp. 237-49.
27. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), dangdai zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao [The Report on the Social Stratification Research in Contemporary China], ed. Lu Xueyi (Beijing: Shehui Kexue Wenxian Chubanshe, 2002);
28. Hu Angang, "Equity and Efficiency," in Wang, one China, Many Paths, pp. 219-33.
29. In this sense, the middle-class norm is inseparable from the governmental discourse of human capital on suzhi, as examined in detail by Ann Anagnost in "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 189-208.
30. CASS, dangdai zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao.
31. For a systematic examination of these studies, see Ann Anagnost, "From 'Class' to 'Social Strata': Grasping the Social Totality in Reform-Era China" (unpublished manuscript).
32. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), p. 8.
33. Hai Ren, "From Wenhua to Wenhua chanye: A Review of Culture in the Contemporary PRC," Modern Chinese Language and Culture, available online at http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/ren.htm.
34. Susan Greenhalgh, "Globalization and Population Governance in China," in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds., Global assemblages: Technology, Politics, and ethics as anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 357.
35. Hanlong Lu, "To Be Relatively Comfortable in an Egalitarian Society," in Deborah S. Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), p. 121.
36. Weber defines "ideal type" as a synthesis or analytical construct of "diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena." See Max Weber, "The Area of Economics, Economic Theory, and the Ideal Type," in essays in economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), p. 248.
37. Xiaoming Wang, "Ban zhang lian de shenhua [The myth of the half face]," in Xiaoming Wang, ed., Zai xin de yishixingtai de longzhao xia: 90 niandai de wenhua yu wenxue fenxi [Under the Shadow of the New ideology: Cultural and Literary analysis in the 1990s] (Nanjing: Jiangshu Renmin Chubanshe, 1999).
38. For a summary of these problems, see Beijing Chenbao, "Luyou renshi cheng zhongguo youke nan cihou [Tourist Industry Professionals Argue that Chinese Tourists Are Difficult]," Beijing Morning News, December 27, 2006.
39. These arguments were posted in a public forum on the hainan.net. Many original news articles and photos were re-posted at the site. See http://1home.hainan.net/New/PublicForum/Content.asp?idWriter=0&Key= 0&strItem=funinfo&idArticle=89696&flag=1.
40. See the Jintan.org website at http://www.jintan.org.
41. Historically, the middle-class norm always regularizes the position of the accomplished in relation to the underachieved. See Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
42. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 62-63.
43. Qiusha Ma, "The Governance of NGOs in China Since 1978: How Much Autonomy?" Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2002): 305-28.
44. For an excellent case study of charity that involves the participation of the masses, see Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, inc.: breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Mnneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006).
45. Martin Lindstrom, buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We buy (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
46. Hai Ren, "The Landscape of Power: Imagineering Consumer Behavior at China's Theme Parks," in Scott A. Lukas, ed., The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp. 97-112.
47. See Hai Ren, "The Middle-Class as a Social Norm: Consumer Citizenship in China's Reform," in Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai, and Hai Ren, eds., Global Futures in east asia (forthcoming).
48. Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 2nd ed. (New York: Open Univ. Press, 2005).
49. Gary Becker, a major figure in formulating economic neoliberalism, argues that delinquency can be calculated as a neoliberal value in self-formation. See his "The Economic Way of Looking at Life," originally presented in 1992, now available online at http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1992/ becker-lecture.html.
50. In fact, as Ren has shown, delinquency in popular culture is historically tied to neoliberalism. See his "Subculture as a Neo-Liberal Conduct of Life in Leisure and Consumption," Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in emerging knowledge 10 (Spring 2005).
51. For a discussion of the divide in neoliberal governmentality between those who embody the new model of citizenship and those who must be taught, see Gary Sigley, "Chinese Governmentalities: Government, Governance and the Socialist Market Economy," economy and Society 31, no. 4 (2006): 492.
52. Marder, "Carl Schmitt and the Risk of the Political," p. 13 (emphasis in the original).