(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
ICT industries, and floating of shares in foreign stock markets are examples of
“neoliberalism as exception” in Chinese socialism.
Chinese “socialist market economy” is underlined by the twin modalities of the
neoliberal governmentality: “neoliberalism as exception” and “exceptions to
neoliberalism” (Ong 2006). While the former refers to state engineered practices to
embrace the market dynamism in order to compete in the global market, the latter
illuminates the struggles between the governing and the governed, power and
knowledge. The mortgage slave phenomenon depicted by Dwelling Narrowness is the
result of such “neoliberal as exception” logic. Since the 1990s, Chinese state has
launched a series of measures to commodify the housing system, to replace the long-
standing in-kind housing subsidy under the socialist welfare system. It is a neoliberal
urbanization perspective that governs the new market housing system (Lee and Zhu,
2006). However, it has led to increasing urban poverty, social polarization and spatial
segregation. Such a neoliberal development is geographically uneven, socially
regressive, and somewhat politically volatile, as numerous cases of violence in
China’s urban redevelopment suggest. The working class sinks further in the
horizontal inequities. All that they can garner to resist state violence is their bare life.
This is represented by the Grandma Li family in Dwelling Narrowness. Grandma Li
resisted the relocation plan in exchange for a better compensation deal for her laid-off
son and daughter-in-law. In the end, she was crushed to death in her own home by the
demolition team who forcibly demolished the house. Grandma Li, as an “exception to
neoliberalism,” is excluded from the neoliberal calculations of China’s urbanization.
People like her are stripped way basic social and political protection and even their
victimization is regarded by the neoliberal advocates as a natural state of affair. As
Ong summarizes, “In China, pro-market policies are interwoven with a socialist state,
private enterprises flourish alongside repressive laws, consumer culture cohabits with
the lack of inalienable rights” (Ong 2007, 6).
Chinese neoliberalism, which took its momentum in the post-1989 era, is defined by
the dual nature of continuity and discontinuity. 1989 remains a threshold, a turning
point in contemporary Chinese history, marked by both continuity (of state socialism
in the political trajectory) and discontinuity (of state socialism in economic
development), premised on the discourses of “transition” and “development” (Wang
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