The Politics of the Dang'an: Spectralization, Spatialization, and Neoliberal Governmentality in China

This essay examines the dang'an system and its post-Mao transformation in order to explore China's recent neoliberal governance. The transformation of the dang'an from a mode of socialist control to a mechanism for enacting market economy serves to spectralize (reduce and derive) Maoist socialism for entrepreneurial capital. Such revisions have also given rise to new forms of spatialization, which reduce workers' consciousness of class and historical temporality and sustain stability. The dang'an and its revisions illustrate how authoritarian and illiberal measures are tinkered into neoliberal technologies in a postsocialist context.