From Passions to Interests: Austerity, Autarky, and Alterity in the Making of the Chinese Reform

Xiaohong Xu, University of Michigan

Building upon Albert Hirschman’s dissection of the ideological shift that preconditioned the rise of modern capitalism, I interrogate the processes of depoliticization that preconditioned China’s integration into global capitalism, in the formation of entrepreneurial selfhood during the late period of the Cultural Revolution and the early Reform period. I trace three phases of this development: austerity, autarky, and alterity. During the first phase, economic demands made by the workers to redress the systemic inequalities and injustice generated by China’s state socialist practices were suppressed as economistic deviation, thanks to a series of power realignment among Communist political elites. The separation of the political from the economic, wrought by the Maoists during the heydays of the Cultural Revolution, allowed the exchange of economic austerity for the exalted political recognition of industrial workers as the leading class of the proletariats. During the second phase, the discourse of autarky (self-reliance), which was forged during the Sino-Soviet split, was reappropriated from the national level to responsiblize collectivities and enterprises. Although self-reliance was not yet used at the individual level (and explicitly discouraged to curb individualism) as in neoliberal entrepreneurial selfhood, the responsibilization of collectivities and enterprises ran counter to the collectivistic logic of collectivities and enterprises. Meanwhile, the simmering popular materialism increasingly contradicted the Maoist paternalist politics that undergirded this collectivist logic. During the third phase of alterity, heated debates in planning economics introduced alternative economic thinking through which the logic of responsibilization was extended from enterprise self-reliance to a prototype of entrepreneurial selfhood. Popular materialism won out over Maoist politics. Meanwhile, the new discourse of individual motivation and interests provided an economic, instead of a political, diagnosis and prognosis of the systemic crisis of Chinese socialism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 155. Capitalizing on the Crisis of Socialism: The Pathways of China's Reform Reconsidered