Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (6 page)

6
. In East Asia, nation-building projects did not always relinquish the past completely. For example, Japan’s modern emperor system employed forms of “creative anachronism” to form the diverse inhabitants of a dispersed island archipelago into the Japanese people through new forms of national pedagogies (Fujitani 1993)—a project that was extended to Taiwan and Korea as part of Japan’s colonial expansion (Ching 2001; Schmid 2002). China’s formation as a modern nation entailed a more deliberate break from the “feudal” structures of the past but no less a molding of the people, in this case “the masses” as new socialist subjects.

7
. For the case of China, see for example the discussions by Lydia Liu (1995) on the translingual movement of conceptions of “individual” and by Tani Barlow (1991) on the emergence of the position of “intellectual” in relation to Enlightenment projects.

8
. A 2006 story in the English edition of the Japanese newspaper
Asahi Shimbun
(September 27, 2006) exemplifies a more recent iteration of this mode of comparison. See “China’s Gifted ‘Superchildren’ on a Fast Track to Success.”

9
. For example, Andre Schmid argues that in early-twentieth-century Korea “shifting understandings of China and Japan were integral to Korean self-knowledge, largely overshadowing the East-West dynamic and giving Koreans several others against which to compare their nation’s particularity” (2002: 10).

10
. See Koschmann (2003: 229) for an account of the 1960 Hakone conference, where Japan historian Jon Hall set out nine essential characteristics of a modern society.

11
. Human capital could be considered the essence of neoliberal subjectivity. It marks a significant departure from earlier forms of labor subjectivity in the sense that the worker is understood as an entrepreneur who invests in his or her own self-development. Much of the literature inspired by Michel Foucault’s (2008) late lectures on neoliberalism sees human capital as a mode of governmentality that incites individuals “to adopt conducts deemed valorizing and to follow models for self-valuation that modify their priorities and inflect their strategic choices” (Feher 2009: 28).

12
. This emphasis on affective labor perhaps accounts for the spread of the concept of EQ (emotional quotient) among human resource managers in East Asia, as well as elsewhere, as a measure of interpersonal skills and leadership potential. A self-help literature has become widespread to teach individuals how to evaluate themselves and develop their emotional intelligence as an aspect of their overall human capital development.

13
. Quoted phrase from Stacy Wagner, personal communication.

14
. In Japan, the term
freedom
connotes a more individualized horizon for the development of human creativity that had been constrained by the deadening and highly gendered institutionalization of the salaryman tracked for upward mobility. As noted earlier, the
freeter
youth has been described as a figure of “the great refusal” of this sort of labor bondage. In South Korea,
freedom
signals the moment of democratization in 1987 following a long era of military dictatorship in close formation with the
chaebol
(Korean corporations). In China, freedom takes the form of “reform and opening” (
gaige kaifang
) in the dismantling of the redistributive structures of the socialist system in favor of market institutions beginning in 1976. In Taiwan,
freedom
also refers to democratization beginning in the late 1980s, during which the KMT (Kuomintang) lost its monolithic governing power.

15
. For one such experiment, see Carl Cassegard’s (2008) discussion of Kojin Karatani’s New Associationist Movement.

Chapter
One

The Middle-Class Norm and Responsible Consumption in China’s Risk Society

HAI REN

China’s neoliberalization, a process known in China as “reform and opening” (
gaige kaifang
), which began in the late 1970s, has extracted individuals from the social institutions developed in socialism and reembedded them within a new sociopolitical system. The embrace of a neoliberal economic and political system, with all its attendant risks, has forced the development of new governmental and social policies to stabilize China’s growing inequality through the conceptual category of the middle class. Within this historical context, life-making and life-building take the form of self-formation but only in such a way that they become measured by the new social norm of the middle class. I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing to examine how individuals transform themselves into entrepreneurial subjects through consumer practices and how private corporations play an important role in cultivating middle-class values and shaping consumer behavior. As is the case with other social engineering projects discussed in this book, such as the training of migrant women workers to fit China’s neoliberal development (Yan,
Chapter Six
in this volume), the making of responsible middle-class subjects through consumption is part of the government’s larger project of engineering a new society for the future.

Neoliberalization,
Risk Society, and the Middle Class

Contemporary Chinese society has been transformed into a risk society, in which individuals and nongovernmental organizations take over responsibilities once assigned to the government. This shift has been tied to China’s neoliberalization, the transformation of China from a socialist country to a neoliberal state, which refers to both the Chinese nation-state under a hybrid capitalist-socialist system and to China as a country where economic rationalism penetrates all aspects of society, including domains such as the political and the cultural that are usually incommensurable or incompatible with the economic realm (Ren 2010a). China’s neoliberal transformation has occurred largely through establishing a relationship between “reform and opening” and national reunification, two seemingly parallel historical agendas of the socialist state since the late 1970s.
1
The former entails various national development projects addressing the modernization (
xiandaihua
) of the economy, culture, technology, and state–society relationship. The reunification issue revolves around the status of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The Chinese government’s reform and opening project has allowed the development of new kinds of productive enterprises that are neither state controlled nor collectively owned. This policy change contradicts both the policies of Mao Zedong’s socialist government, which had eliminated all forms of private ownership and their associated productive relations, and the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the ruling party of China founded on commitment to the causes and interests of the working class. To resolve these contradictions, Deng Xiaoping’s government declared in 1978 that the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) had been a complete failure and had caused chaos in the Chinese state. Deng’s repudiation of Mao’s legacy opened up possibilities for rejecting Maoist practices (including prohibition of private ownership). Building on this decision, Deng and his successors gradually modified the Communist Party constitution and incorporated key changes as amendments to the national constitution.

In 1998, Jiang Zemin, the secretary general of the CCP and the president of China, asked the party members to propose a theoretical structure for a new system of political representation. In February 2000, he proclaimed the “Three Represents” (
sange daibiao
) in which the CCP represents “the developmental requirement of the advanced productive forces in China,” “the progressive direction of the advanced culture in China,” and “the fundamental interest of the vast majority of the people.”
2
In 2003, the Third
Plenum
of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China formally incorporated this theory into the revised party constitution. Meanwhile, the Chinese government formally changed its English translation from the Chinese Communist Party to the Communist Party of China (CPC). Therefore, when the Three Represents and property rights became formally institutionalized, the transformation of the Communist Party–led state from a state of the working classes to one of the capitalist class (including the nouveaux riches) was completed (Ren 2010b).

Meanwhile, the reincorporation of capitalist Hong Kong into socialist China has done what no other contemporary event could have done: It provided both the historical precondition for and the primary process of China’s radical neoliberal transformation. Under British rule, Hong Kong was recognized not simply as a capitalist economy but as one of the freest market economies in the world.
3
The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 that set out the conditions for Hong Kong’s return to China called for Hong Kong to retain its capitalist system and a measure of political autonomy for a period of fifty years, a provision commonly referred to as “one country, two systems” (
yiguo liangzhi
) and viewed by the Chinese as a potentially longterm arrangement. This framework was first proposed by Deng Xiaoping during the Sino-British negotiation process. It was extended to create various types of special economic and political zones, enabling the practical coexistence between socialist and capitalist spaces. Thus, the legal framework of one country, two systems, on being translated into political and economic practices in China, shaped the transformation of the Chinese state into a neoliberal state. By casting reunification as an
uncompromisable
issue of national sovereignty, the Chinese government made this a default justification for all political, economic, social, and cultural changes. That is, reunification with Hong Kong demanded the supreme power of sovereignty to act ethically by not abiding by existing (Maoist) socialist norms and laws. Thus, anything incompatible with regaining sovereignty over Hong Kong was to be modified, changed, or rejected—including Maoist forms of mobilizing and empowering ordinary people, political representation of the working class, socialist productive relations, economic policies, and nationalism (Ren 2010a; 2010b; 2012).

The spatial production of neoliberal social space followed Deng’s theory of one country, two systems. This is shown by the creation of a series of four special economic zones (beginning in 1980) in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, where nonsocialist systems—not only private markets but also private
controls
over the economy and the population—were developed. In 1984, the year of the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the government expanded the special economic zone concept to another fourteen coastal cities and to Hainan Island. In the 1990s, many priority development regions and export processing zones were established across the country. In 1997, Hong Kong became the first special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China, and two years later Macau became the second. Each region is supposed to operate for fifty years according to its own miniconstitution.

Similar to the idea of the special economic zone is the proliferation of numerous privately controlled zones through urban real estate development projects. Some past and present Communist Party officials and their relatives (for example, Chen Xitong and Chen Lianyu, members of the politburo) could use their access to political capital and networks for accruing wealth in the new economy. For them, neoliberal policies like privatization of land use offered a horizon of freedom to pursue the good life, whether in terms of a “relatively comfortable life” (
xiaokang shenghuo
), in Deng Xiaoping’s words, or a lifestyle oriented toward cosmopolitan or international norms. Zhang Yuchen’s prior status as the head of Beijing’s construction bureau, for example, gave him the opportunity to accumulate vast wealth (Kahn 2004). By contrast, those who lacked access to social and political capital were affected negatively by privatization and the erosion of social welfare institutions. As their life chances were diminished, they become marginalized as subjects in need, whether as landless peasants or laid-off workers.

During China’s neoliberal transformation, the foundation of Chinese state sovereignty has shifted away from the collective body of the people and toward the individual body of the citizen.
4
The ways in which individuals become socialized as Chinese citizens have changed significantly. Not only are the institutional structures of socialist China disappearing, but forms of practical knowledge, common sense, and guiding norms associated with socialism are no longer legitimate or empowering tools. Increasingly, Chinese citizens are expected to rely on themselves in their life-building process. This life-building process, however, does not presume a straightforward, upward, or progressive trajectory, which is based on a will-have-been of future anteriority (Berlant 2007: 758). Its outcomes are more conditional and contingent. Thus, the neoliberal do-it-yourself biographical process includes not merely positive trajectories but also delayed, regressive, or sidetracked ones.

For example, the socialist work unit (
danwei
) was not only a workplace but also an entire welfare system (Yi Wang 2003; Bray 2005). It provided
employment,
housing, child care, health care, and education. However, the neoliberal reforms, especially of the state-owned enterprises that employed the majority of the workers, have systematically reduced the state’s welfare function with the withering away of these work units and the social networks formed through them. Some individuals have taken advantage of new opportunities to become active participants in the market. Meanwhile, millions of laid-off workers face new challenges of making a living. Some have been retrained to take temporary and part-time employment, such as domestic help and service sector jobs, while others have become permanently unemployed or underemployed because they are unable to compete either with the growing number of young migrant laborers from rural areas (Pun 2005) or with new college graduates with greater knowledge of the norms of international business and work practices (Ross 2006: 18).