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Autonomous choices and patriotic professionalism: On governmentality in late-socialist China

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03085140600960815

1469-5766

Lisa Hoffman,

Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

Abstract This paper argues that choice and autonomy constitute important new techniques of governing in late-socialist China. College students no longer receive direct state job assignments upon graduation, going instead to job fairs where they experience a degree of autonomy from state planning organs that was not available under high socialism's central planning. Yet even as post-Mao governmental rationalities have promoted autonomous decisions, young professionals’ experiences of choice have remained framed within notions of social responsibility and patriotism. This paper examines how both neoliberal governmentality and a nationalism steeped in Maoist notions of state strength, achieved today through reform-era economic competitiveness, are intertwined in the emergence of what is called ‘patriotic professionalism’. Keywords: neoliberalismgovernmentalityChinaprofessionalschoicesubject formation Notes 1. For helpful comments on multiple drafts and sustained engagement I thank Ann Anagnost, Stephen Collier, Monica DeHart, Jennifer Hubbert, and Aihwa Ong. The paper has gone through numerous drafts and conference presentations between 2002 and 2005. I am grateful for the comments and questions from participants over the years, especially Jeff Maskovsky and Wing-shing Tang, and for comments from this volume's editor Elaine Jeffreys and the anonymous reviewers for Economy and Society. The research and write up was supported by the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, Foreign Language and Area Studies, Berkeley's Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Washington, Tacoma Urban Studies Program, and The Harry Bridges Labour Centre at University of Washington, Seattle. I take responsibility for the failings of this piece. 2. When I attended the weekly fair in 1993, it was held in a small room in the corner of an antique store and entertainment complex on the edge of a city park and attracted a handful of companies. Most of the visitors were retired personnel or those looking for a ‘better’ job with more opportunity and/or higher wages. By the fall of 1995 the centre had moved to a much larger building near the municipal library. Job seekers by then had to purchase tickets before they entered the main hall and they carried resumes as they approached the tables. After a severely overcrowded Spring Festival fair for college graduates in 1996, the Personnel Bureau decided to move the summer graduation fair to the city's new exhibition hall. The material in this article is based on studies conducted over the course of ten years of anthropological fieldwork in Dalian beginning in the summer of 1993 and extending through December 2003, including dissertation fieldwork from 1995–1996. In addition to going to job fairs regularly over the years, I interviewed human resource managers at their offices, job seekers who self-identified as talent, several classes of graduating seniors in local universities, university employment officials, and those who managed and ran the city talent markets and human resource offices. I also conducted surveys with job seekers at major job fair events and several classes of graduating students. In addition to extended formal interviews that lasted anywhere from one to six hours, I had countless informal exchanges with people as well as social engagements with young professionals and their families across the city. 3. I use the terms ‘high socialism’ and ‘traditional socialism’ interchangeably in this article. They refer to the period known as the Maoist era (1949–78) when China followed a centrally planned command economy system. The reform or post-Mao, era began when Deng Xiaoping came into power at the end of 1978 and initiated what people call ‘market socialism’ (see Bray 2005: 204). 4. In the assignment system, universities reported graduates and majors to the province, which forwarded this to central authorities. They combined this with work unit requests and made assignment decisions. Plans were then sent back down to the local level for implementation. Early reforms in this system allowed the planning process to happen at the local rather than central level (see Agelasto and Adamson Citation1998). 5. In focusing on patriotism, I do not mean to imply that other forms of responsibility, such as that to the family, are unimportant (see also Fong 2004). Making ‘responsible’ decisions, both in terms of the nation and the family, overlapped with desires for success, dreams of fulfilling one's potential, and hopes for social mobility in a highly fluid social world. Techniques of rule, in other words, cross over between state, market, and familial domains. This paper focuses on one site where these domains intersect, the job search process. 6. In arguing that choice is a form of governing, I do not mean to discount the very real and tangible changes in Chinese citizens’ everyday lives. Rather, I wish to highlight that the arena of choice is a complex and sometimes contradictory process of subject formation. It includes practices as diverse as ‘mutual choice’ where employees and employers make decisions instead of state functionaries, negotiations over the meaning of competence and success, gender-specific opinions about appropriate positions and careers, and debates about familial stability and social mobility (Hoffman 2000). 7. ‘Freedom’, in many analyses of the introduction of market competition into socialist states is understood as an ‘absence’ of government. These arguments also suggest that the state either intervenes in people's lives or it does not, implying one could identify a social field within which one finds neither state forms of governance nor ways of knowing shared with state rationalities. My analysis takes a different view. Moreover, by choosing to write about subject formation rather than about political interests and agency per se, I wish to avoid the assumption that unified and unitary subjects exist outside of power relations, regulatory norms, and discursive and non-discursive practices (see also Sigley 2004: 560). For more on how the regulation and management of subjects happens ‘through freedom’ see Barry et al. Citation1996; Burchell 1996; Foucault Citation1991; Ong Citation2003, 2006; Rose Citation1992, 1993, 1996a, Citation1999. 8. My position supports the argument that we may use ‘neoliberalism’ as well as Foucault's insights on governmentality to understand China, and places more generally with non-liberal/illiberal traditions. A number of scholars have engaged with this lively debate, for example, Anagnost Citation2004; Dutton Citation1988, Citation1992; Hindess 2004; Ong 2006; Sigley Citation1996; Yan Citation2003. 9. Gries (2004: 116-134) argues that the Party is in fact losing control of popular nationalism, as evidenced in protests over the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the fervor in 1996 and 1997 over the publication of China Can Say No and China Can Still Say No (see Song Qiang et al. Citation1996a, Citation1996b).