From ‘Class’ to ‘Social Strata': grasping the social totality in reform-era China
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01436590801931488
ISSN1360-2241
Autores Tópico(s)China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance
ResumoAbstract Reform era China has witnessed the simultaneous production of a middle class and increasing socioeconomic inequality. The ideological counterpart of this development is a new form of cultural nationalism that stands in striking contrast to Maoist developmentalism and in striking conformity with neoliberal logics. This article explores this shift in Chinese nationalism and national ideology by looking at the rejection of the language of class and the adoption of social strata as the language of social analysis. This shift has produced a new model of citizenship which seeks to manage the newly stratified society by articulating inequality as cultural difference in a hierarchy of national belonging. At the same time this neoliberal ethos is in dialogue with calls for social responsibility by left-liberal intellectuals in the wake of a rising number of popular protests and a growing concern about social inequality. This essay will discuss aspects of middle-class formation in China's economic reforms, first, by exploring its textual production as a category for social scientific analysis and social critique. Then it will explore how middle-classness becomes represented in mass media forms such as advertising as a new form of identity that is staged in anticipation of its realisation as a widespread social phenomenon. Notes I would like to thank Radhika Desai, Gregory Blue and Michael Bodden for their inviting me to the workshops on 'From Developmental to Cultural Nationalism in Asia' at the University of Victoria in 2003 and 2004. I note a special debt to Radhika Desai, whose intellectual acuity and patient editorial work was critical to the development of the published version. Thanks also go to the conference participants, especially Mark Selden, who has long been a source of inspiration, and to two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft. I also wish to thank Andrea Arai, David Davies, Matthew Hale, Gladys Jian, Hai Ren and Hairong Yan for conversations that contributed greatly to this argument. 1 See R Desai 'Introduction' and 'Conclusion' in this special issue. 2 G Sigley, 'Chinese governmentalities: government, governance, and the socialist market economy', Economy and Society, 35 (4), 2006, p 495. 3 L Sun, 'Re-accumulation of resources: the background of social stratification in China in the 1990s', Social Sciences in China, Spring, 2002, p 60. 4 L Tomba, 'Creating an urban middle class: social engineering in Beijing', The China Journal, 51, 2004, pp 1 – 26. 5 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (cass), Dangdai zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao (Report on the Social Stratification Research in Contemporary China), ed-in-chief Lu Xueyi, Beijing: Shehui Kexue Wenxian Chubanshe, 2002. See H Ren, 'The middle-class as a social norm: consumer citizenship in China's reform', unpublished manuscript, for a more detailed discussion of this report. See also a special issue of Social Sciences in China (Li et al, English edition) on social stratification, also published in 2002. 6 K Misra, 'Neo-left and neo-right in post-Tiananmen China', Asian Survey, 43 (5), 2003, pp 721 – 722. Other ways of characterising the opposing camps, according to Y Guo, are the New Right v the New Left, conservatives v radicals, or liberals v socialists/social democrats. The lack of consensus on how to characterise these differing positions is further complicated to the extent that a number of figures involved in these debates may straddle the divide in moving from one set of issues to another. Y Guo, 'Barking up the wrong tree: the liberal – nationalist debate on democracy and identity', in L H Liew & S Wang (eds), Nationalism, Democracy, and National Integration in China, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, pp 23, 24. Sun Liping describes the debate as being between liberals, who argue for a more perfect market mechanism to regulate economic life, and 'the New Left' (xinzuo pai), who argue for more government interventions to redistribute wealth as a counterbalance to the market. Sun, 'Re-accumulation of resources', p 65. 7 Members of the latter group reject the label 'New Left' because it seems to associate them with a past history of class warfare and therefore becomes ideologically loaded. G Mobo, an intellectual identified with this group, sees both liberals and the new left as two strains of liberalism. M Gao, 'The rise of neo-nationalism and the new left: a postcolonial and postmodern perspective', in Liew & Wang, Nationalism, Democracy, and National Integration in China, p 50. G Yang, also identified as a member, 'favours the welfare state goals of J Rawls while the liberals favour the market mediated opportunity of Hayek'. T Cheek, 'Historians as public intellectuals in contemporary China', in E Gu & M Goldman (eds), Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, p 219, n 20. 8 See, for example, T Wen, 'Centenary reflections on the "three dimensional problem" of rural China', Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2 (2), 2001, p 294. 9 H Wang, China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp 124 – 125. 10 Misra, 'Neo-left and neo-right in post-Tiananmen China', pp 737 – 740. 11 Ibid, pp 742 – 744. 12 People's Daily, 'Building harmonious society crucial for China's progress: Hu', 27 June 2005, at http://english.people.com.cn/200506/27/eng20050627_192495.html, accessed 24 May 2006. Wen Tiejun, an outspoken advocate of rural reform, lists the three rural problems as rural people, rural society and rural production. He argues that any plan for agricultural reform needs to be premised on labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive development as the primary challenge for the rural economy is underemployment. Agricultural labour should be deployed in building state infrastructure, even if it implies a slower growth rate. Also, allowing the transfer of surplus rural population to urban areas by removing the hukou system would improve their access to employment. Wen, 'Centenary reflections', pp 287, 294. 13 People's Daily, 'All about xiaokang', 10 November 2002, at http://english.people.com.cn/200211/10/eng20021110_106598.shtml, accessed 24 May 2006. In 2002 Jiang Zemin raised this standard by setting a new goal for a per capita gdp of US$2000 by 2020. 14 J Wong, 'Xiao-kang: Deng Xiaoping's socio-economic development target for China', Journal of Contemporary China, 7 (17), 1998, p 142. 15 Ibid, p 152. 16 B Zhao, 'Consumerism, Confucianism, communism: making sense of China today', New Left Review, 222, 1997, p 51. 17 Q He, 'Wealth and poverty: an analysis of current social stratification', Dongfang, 11 May 1993. See also Q He, Pitfalls of Modernization: Economic and Social Problems in Contemporary China (Xiandaihua de xianjing: Dangdai Zhongguo de jingji shehui wenti), Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1998. I am largely drawing from her English publication 'China's listing social structure', New Left Review, September – October, 2000, pp 68 – 99. This appeared in Chinese as 'A comprehensive analysis of the evolution of China's social formation' (Dangqian Zhongguo shehui jiegou yanbian de zongtixing fenxi), Shuwu (Book Room), 3, 2000. However, it is important to note that the impact of her work was felt much earlier in the Chinese context. Also, her book Pitfalls of Modernization came out almost at the same time as many of the other popular works on social stratification in the period immediately following the announcement of the staggering growth of the Gini coefficient. 18 S Liping et al, cited in He, 'China's listing social structure', p 70. 19 Ibid. This sense of outrage was reprised more recently by the public letter from Ma Bin, with 30 other signatories among the top Party echelons in June of 2007, decrying recent revelations of slave labour in a Shanxi brick kiln. See Ma Bin et al, 'Our views on the black brick kiln and other incidents and recommendations for the 17th Party Congress', available online at MR Zine, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/china070807.html, accessed 7 December 2007. This letter originally appeared on a Chinese website, which was promptly shut down until it was pulled off. It is revealing of the extent to which these issues are subject to internal debate within the Party. To quote its opening passages: 'For us communists, it is neither right nor possible to treat or even speak of such incidents as inevitable phenomena of the primary stage of socialism. This was obviously a capitalist scene, incorporating certain scenes of cruel exploitation, and the tragic, dog-eat-dog world of primitive accumulation under feudalism and slavery'. 20 He, 'China's listing social structure', p 95. 21 Liang was already a popular fiction writer and the author of a widely read memoir of his experience as a Red Guard and sent-down youth entitled Confessions of a Red Guard (Yige hongweibing de zibai). 22 M Xia, 'From camaraderie to the cash nexus: economic reforms, social stratification, and their political consequences in China', Journal of Contemporary China, 8 (21), 1999, p 349. 23 X Liang, A Comprehensive Analysis of Social Stratification in China [Zhongguo shehui ge jieceng fenxi], Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 1997, pp 1 – 3. I cannot read this metaphor without mentally referencing the aggressive marketing of shampoo and conditioner in the new commodity economy. One young advertising professional I interviewed had been given an international award for a televised ad campaign for a foreign brand of hair conditioner. The real challenge, he told me, is that there was no awareness of conditioner as a necessary supplement to personal hygiene in China. Memories of masses of silky black hair undulating on screen in slow motion irrepressibly come to mind for me here. Also, the image of properly conditioned hair was clearly linked to business success and the culling process of professional advancement, giving a discretionary hygiene item a much weightier imperative. 24 In fact, many upwardly mobile subjects that I asked used this metaphor to illustrate their aspirations for the future. I am pretty sure that this is because of the ways in which social science discourse has circulated in a more popular literature on the new social strata. 25 M Lin with M Galikowski, 'Liang Xiaosheng's moral critique of China's modernization process', in The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era, New York: St Martin's Press, 1999, pp 135 – 139. 26 China Daily, 'Lessons on society's class structure', 28 October 2004, at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-10/28/content_386374.htm, accessed 24 May 2006. 27 Sun, 'Re-accumulation of resources'. 28 For an eloquent description of the 'death in life' of the rural areas, see H Yan, 'Neoliberal governmentality and neohumanism: organizing suzhi/value flow through labor recruitment networks', Cultural Anthropology, 18 (3), pp 493 – 523. 29 Y Qin, China's Middle Class: The Structure and Central Tendencies of a Social Structure that has not yet Arrived (Zhongguo zhongchan jieji: welai shehui jiegou de zhuliu), Beijing: Zhongguo jihua chubanshe, 1999. 30 Qin, China's Middle Class, pp 2 – 3. One cannot help but compare this optimistic analysis of individual achievement to He Qinglian's devastating analysis of mobility structures in the reform era as being limited to those with political capital in the old regime that was convertible into money capital in the new. He, 'China's listing social structure', pp 72 – 75. 31 Timothy Mitchell has discussed Smiles's influence in colonial Egypt, representing for an Egyptian modernising elite the secret of national strength. Similarly there were Samuel Smiles study groups in Meiji Japan as well as in Republican-era China. T Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. 32 When new acquaintances of a certain social stratum learned that my home was in Seattle they frequently expressed grudging admiration of Gates's business stratagems and invoked 'Microsoft hegemony' (Weiruan baquan). Microsoft's incursions into the Chinese market were seen as a kind of neocolonialism. For this reason, the founder of Yahoo, in being ethnically Chinese, was lionised as China's answer to Bill Gates in the battle for cyber-presence. I am indebted to discussions with David Davies in which he shared some of his current research on chenggong xue with me. 33 Ren is creatively appropriating the idea of a risk subject developed by Ulrich Beck in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992. A risk-averse subject who knows who to calculate the costs and benefits of his or her actions in this context becomes a subject who knows how to take advantage of grey areas of the law by calculating the likelihood of being made subject to the force of the law. 34 Xiaoqun Xu sees jishi wenxue (journalistic literature) as a new genre, which grew out of the older baogao wenxue (investigative journalism) in response to a new market for popular magazines and tabloid journalism that exploded in the post-Mao economic reforms. This genre of writing, in his estimation, tends to be more sensationalising and commercial than the older baogao wenxue. It encompasses a range of writing 'from voyeuristic depictions of sex-crimes' to all kinds of social problems. X Xu, 'The discourse on love, marriage, and sexuality in post-Mao China: a reading of the journalistic literature on women', Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 4 (2), 1996, pp 381 – 414. It suggests for my argument here yet another vehicle for the anticipatory staging of middle-classness in a form readily consumable by an urban readership. 35 J Wu & Y Xu, Who Am I? Social Position in Contemporary China (Wo shi shei: dangdai zhongguo ren de shehui dingwei), Beijing: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1997. 36 She raised these distinctions in reference to differences in parental strategies for educating their only child. Parents of lower intellectual capital would, in her observation, be more likely to focus on test scores, whereas university professors might have a more relaxed attitude in seeking a more 'well rounded' (bijiao quanmian de) education for their child. 37 See also He, 'China's listing social structure', p 76. 38 Y Yin, High-Class Grey: A True Depiction of China's Urban Middle Class (Gaoji hui: Zhongguo chengshi zhongchan jieceng xiezhen), Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1999. 39 A Appadurai, 'Global ethnoscapes: notes and queries for a transnational anthropology', in Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp 48 – 65. 40 I am indebted to Ren Hai for recognising the significance of this supplement and his generosity in bringing it to my attention. See his discussion of how middle-class self-formation through consumption practices constitutes a form of biopower that produces new forms of life in ways that are regulated through government at a distance. Ren, 'The middle-class as a social norm'. 41 The Chinese words for hardware and software are literally 'hard environment' (ying huanjing) and 'soft environment' (ruan huanjing). Presumably this is a metaphoric extension of computer language to the marketing of housing for a technocratic elite which is very much at home with technology. 42 D Fraser, 'Inventing oasis: luxury housing advertisements and reconfiguring domestic space in Shanghai', in D S Davis (ed), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000, pp 25 – 53. 43 While doing fieldwork in 1999 – 2000 I heard this phrase used repeatedly as middle-class friends described their new housing situations to me. A new mortgage policy begun in 1998 had opened up this avenue of investment in housing for many in the professional classes. It is worth noting that the phrase originates in the Chinese translation of Marx's Capital. 44 Jonathan Unger reports, based on his observations of similar housing developments in Chengdu, that most of these residents are salaried employees in the public sphere. 'They are academics and high-school teachers, doctors, engineers, and the white-collar staffs of state-owned enterprises, as well as government administrators of all stripes'. J Unger, 'China's conservative middle class', Far Eastern Economic Review, 27 – 31 April 2006. 45 Tomba, 'Creating an urban middle class', p 17. 46 The term dingke now circulates in Chinese popular discourse as a transliteration of the English dink (double income, no kids). I first encountered it in a conversation with a married professional man in his early 30s who was speculating on this as a strategy for self-realisation in the middle class. 47 See S Ewan, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, New York: Basic Books, 1988, for a discussion of the alienated loner as an advertising figure who embodies the paradoxical doubling of alienation and freedom in the dialectic of enlightenment. 48 WF Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans Robert Beck, Cambridge: Polity, 1986, p 123. See W Mazzarella, '"Very Bombay": contending with the global in an Indian advertising agency', Cultural Anthropology, 18 (1), 2003, pp 33 – 71, for a discussion of how a brand also sets up a chain of connotations which constitutes a virtual world that the consumer is invited to enter. 49 C Gordon, 'Government rationality: an introduction', in G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p 44. 50 See A Anagnost, 'The corporeal politics of "quality" (suzhi)', Public Culture, 16 (2), 2004, pp 189 – 208 for a more detailed discussion of the discourse of quality (suzhi). See D Davies, 'Capitalists by any other name: celebrity entrepreneurs as business models for "success"', unpublished manuscript for a discussion of how the concept of zuo ren (literally 'to make a person') references techniques of 'self-making' in narratives of success. See Ren, 'The middle class as a social norm', for a discussion of 'life-making' in a similar manner but in the arena of middle-class consumption. Yan, 'Neoliberal governmentality' discusses zuo ren as an aspect of the neo-humanist appeals to rural women to develop their personhood through domestic labour in the city as a form of 'social university' (shehui daxue). 51 PRC State Council, China's Population and Development in the 21st Century, 2000, p 3, at http://www.cpirc.org.cn/en/whitepaper.htm, accessed 21 August 2004. 52 Agence France Presse, 'China reports first rise in poverty since start of reforms', 18 July 2004. The government's official poverty line is drawn at CNY625 (roughly $78) per capita annual income, whereas the UN draws the line at $1 per day or $365 per year (see Asian Development Bank, Agreement between the Government of the People's Republic of China and the Asian Development Bank on a Poverty Reduction Partnership, signed 29 September 2003, for PRC standard). T Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, discusses the formation of 'the national economy' in relation to a global system that requires comparability between 'like' units and enables the holding of China up to an international standard. 53 Y Zhao, 'China's wealthy live by a creed: Hobbes and Darwin, meet Marx', New York Times, 28 February 2004. 54 M Foucault, 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 – 1976, New York: Picador, 2003, pp 254 – 255. 55 Ibid, p 241. 56 Ibid, p 256. 57 Sigley, 'Chinese governmentalities', p 495. 58 Cited in ibid, p 500 from the Fourteenth Party Congress Report. 59 This is materialised in protests by urban residents mobilised against the demolition of their neighbourhoods for the construction of upmarket residential developments, by laid-off soe workers, especially in China's 'rust belt', and by migrant labourers who are owed back wages. Government estimates of unpaid wages to construction workers suggest a figure that is more than [euro]10 billion. One can only imagine that this must be a very rough estimate, given the difficulties of collecting statistical data for unpaid wages. S Sillanpää, 'Overworked, underpaid workers build new China', Helsingin sanomat, 1 May 2004, at http://www.asianlabour.org/archives/001544.php, accessed 20 August 2004. Protests against urban relocations in Beijing in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games have resulted in two reported cases of self-immolation. South China Morning Post, 30 November 2003. 60 Yan, 'Neoliberal governmentality and neohumanism'. 61 G C Spivak, 'Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value', in Other Worlds, New York: Routledge, 1988, pp 154 – 174. 62 It might be helpful to note here that the idealist predication of the subject as an 'intendedness toward an object' is counterposed to the materialist predication of the subject through his/her experience in labour. The emphasis here is on a shift of consciousness in the reorientation of a new model citizen from production to consumption.
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