The Great Separation: The Cultural Revolution Crisis and the Political Origins of Postsocialist China

Xiaohong Xu, University of Michigan

This paper theorizes the profound impact of the performativity of crisis politics by examining how the Cultural Revolution (1966-1968) has shaped contemporary China and its paradoxical role in global capitalism. First, I conceptualize the hegemony of postsocialist China as “ordo-economism”, which embraces a depoliticized form of economism premised on the rejection of mass politics and primacy of stability maintenance. Ordo-economism and neoliberalism, despite many differences, both separate the political and the economic. This separation in ordo-economism originated in a starkly different (and earlier) process than that in neoliberalism. I trace it to the heydays of the Cultural Revolution, when the Maoists made the pivotal separation of the political from the economic during the worker uprising in Shanghai, in order to stave off a counter-coalition among Communist political elites and score a political victory amidst the crisis. I explain why this performative pivot succeeded in Shanghai thanks to a set of contingent circumstances yet failed catastrophically nationwide, leading to a growing disenchantment with mass politics and a simmering popular economism. In response, the Maoists abandoned mass politics and adopted a top-down paternalistic egalitarian program to address popular economism. The approach backfired and resulted in the Dengist disavowal of Maoist politics as a triumph of economic rationality over political irrationality. The separation of the economic and the political thus persisted, despite the failure of the Maoist project that initially motivated it. Ordo-economism came about as a boomerang effect of the Maoist separation of the political from the economic. Extending Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Ellen Wood’s seminal diagnosis of the separation of the political and the economic in modern capitalism, this paper integrates the history of state socialism and its crisis into the analysis of global capitalism and sheds light on strange parallels and bedfellow relationships between China’s ordo-economism and neoliberalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 37. Crisis and Social Transformation