Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics

Postscript: Answering the Question, What Is Chinese Postsocialism?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p o s t s c r i p t Answering the Question, What Is Chinese Postsocialism? C hinese socialism has been a dominant tradition throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It is no exaggeration to say that Chinese modernity has been to a large extent the development, revision, and rethinking of socialist modernity. Much of the socialist legacy has been repudiated and jettisoned, and yet much of it persists in people’s minds and still exists, like a ghost from a previous life, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the first half of the twentieth century, anarchists, socialists, and communists projected a vision of socialist society for China’s future as well as fighting for the material realization of such a blueprint. Even a traditional thinker like Kang Youwei, under the mystical cloak of Confucianism, described his utopian Great Commonwealth (datong) in thinly disguised socialist terms. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, socialism achieved a hegemonic status . Socialist policies were implemented in all realms and in various ways, for example, in the abolishment of private property, the nationalization of means of production, economic egalitarianism, plus a Mao-style “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the post-Mao era, fundamental changes have occurred in politics, economics , ideology, and everyday life. Deng Xiaoping’s policy of Reform and p o s t s c r i p t . 205 Openness (gaige kaifang) introduced a new set of socioeconomic practices to a nominally socialist state. Prevalent theoretical models such as the fanfare over postcolonialism were inadequate to describe such a historical condition and intellectual -emotional syndrome. Consequently, in Chinese studies, a new term has been invented to signify mainland China: “postsocialism.” Arif Dirlik first used this term in the anthology Marxism and the Chinese Experience, published in 1989. The term is partly derived from the notion of “postmodernism,” defined by Jean-François Lyotard as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Postsocialism is first and foremost a historical condition in which “socialism has lost its coherence as a metatheory of politics because of the attenuation of the socialist vision in its historical unfolding; partly because of a perceived need on the part of socialist states to adjust ‘actually existing socialism ’ to the demands of a capitalist world order, but also because of the vernacularization of socialism in its absorption into different national contexts.”1 Postsocialism , then, is the historical condition of Deng’s China, where the masses have lost faith in the ideology of socialism and the regime has endeavored to inject capitalist elements into the Chinese economy and society in order to facilitate the state’s modernization program. Nicely put, the aim of postsocialism is to “use capitalism to develop socialism.” Immediately after the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four headed by Madame Mao in late 1976, the Chinese regime declared the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and “class struggle” as the central task of Chinese socialism. Mao’s vision and practice of “permanent revolution” were brushed aside. Instead, the state turned its attention to the agenda of modernization , or the Four Modernizations as outlined by former premier Zhou Enlai. After he ousted Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping went ahead with broad social economic reforms, such as disbanding collective farms and people’s communes (renmin gongshe), reinstating private ownership, setting up capitalist-style special economic zones, and seeking technological know-how from the capitalist West. Mao had predicted that Deng would be a “revisionist,” a “capitalist-roader” (zouzi pai) from within the ranks of the Communist Party, and someone who would “overturn the appraisal” (fan’an) of his prized Cultural Revolution once in power. Mao was right. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party under Deng’s control officially denounced the Cultural Revolution as a major error of Comrade Mao Zedong. Shortly before, Mao’s China had been held up as a paragon of socialism by radical revolutionaries and socialist sympathizers from around the world. Deng Xiaoping confronted worldwide leftist condemnation for his betrayal of Mao’s revolutionary legacy. However, Deng’s deviation from Mao’s orthodoxy was not necessarily the demise of socialism in China. Dirlik hastens to add, “postsocialism, rather than 206 . p o s t s c r i p t signaling the end of socialism, offers the possibility in the midst of a crisis in socialism of rethinking socialism in new...