(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
2003). What we have witnessed in the post-1989 China is a market-authoritarian
developmental neoliberalism that is fundamentally undemocratic. Chinese new leftists
have called for reassessing Chinese modernity by calling upon the Party-state to live
up to its name as the vanguard of China’s working class, resist the global capitalist
onslaught, and address the mounting social problems—such as class inequality,
collapse of welfare, healthcare and education regimes—that are the consequences of
Chinese market socialism. Wang Hui (2003)’s attack on state manipulation and
interference in the so-called free market and his plea for economic and social justice
on behalf of the disenfranchised and victims of the violence of China’s neoliberalism
is an example.
China’s economic reform builds upon efficiency, profit and GDP growth, with capital
and marketization as the magic carpet to fast track its economic goals, often at the
cost environment, social security, ethics and human rights. Not only has efficiency
replaced equity in productivity but also taken over accountability in governance.
Traditional disparaging attitude toward peasants, laborers and manual workers
resurged in post-Mao China, just as the utopian to build an egalitarian socialist society
vanished in the onslaught of the state-engineered economic reforms modeled on
liberal and neoliberal logics. Haiping’s lament over her sharing a building with
laborers and laid-off workers is telling of the elitist attitude toward the urban poor.
Even the communist party itself has consciously moved away from its original image
as a vanguard revolutionary party of the working class and redefined itself as a
nationalistic, all-people party that represents advanced cultural and productive forces,
that is, those of new social strata of private entrepreneurs, managers and
professionals.
The neoliberal developmentalism has created a pyramid social structure in China,
with the political and economic elite on the top, an underdeveloped professional class
in the middle, and the rest of the 80% of Chinese population at the bottom of the
society (He 2000). Contrary to the willing expectation that Chinese newly emerged
middle class would function as a positive social force to promote the rule of law,
members of this vulnerable class are at best in the forefront to promote their class
interest, rather than standing beside and behind the vast strata of Chinese working
class to promote liberalization and democratization of Chinese society. The so-called
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