(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Neoliberalism is understood as a type of economic policy, a cultural structure, a set of
particular attitudes toward individual responsibility, entrepreneurship and self-
improvement. It is also a type of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault
2008, 218, 147, 145). The different dimensions of neoliberalism are believed to be
implemented through market imperatives. For example, as part of the techniques of
governmentality and cultural structure, individuals are viewed and trained as self
enterprising and ratiocinative actors; their creativity needs to be unlocked and
unleashed in a co-creationist production, through which the consumers create value
for the corporate, all in a natural state of affairs. Apart from its different dimensions,
neoliberal practices also takes many different routes with varying results globally.
Neoliberalism is an evolving process and “construed as a historically specific,
ongoing, and internal contradictory process of market-driven socio-spatial
transformation, rather than as a fully actualized policy regime, ideological form, or
regulatory framework” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 253). Whether it is Latin
American neoliberalism or Euro-American neoliberalism or postsocialist
neoliberalism, neoliberalism is always hard to pin down, and there is lack of
connection between rhetoric/definition and reality. It is said that the few instances of
success have taken place in countries that have marched to their own drummers. The
case of China, which has violated most rules in the neoliberal guidebook and yet
followed the path of market-oriented direction in economic development, suggests
that neoliberalism is a heterodox, rather than orthodox. Viewed this way, Chinese
neoliberalism, as well as any other forms of neoliberalism, can be referred to, at best,
as “actually existing neoliberalism.” This term, according to Brenner and Theodore
(2002, 349), emphasizes “the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring
projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local
contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes,
regulatory practices, and political struggles.” It recognizes the incoherence of marketoriented
neoliberal pursuits in national restructuring projects.
China is not only an actually existing neoliberalism but also actually existing
postsocialism. Postsocialism is used to describe the incoherence of “socialism with
Chinese characteristics”. It marks a discontinuity with the Maoist socialist tradition
while retaining enough room for continuity with tradition – not just the socialist past
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