(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
model of Chinese development rests on experimentation and combination of
unconventional institutional innovations with some elements drawn from the
neoliberal recipe that has been tested elsewhere. There is a mixture of neoliberal, non-
liberal, and anti-liberal elements in governance. To affix a “post” to neoliberalism
would both overestimate the neoliberal logic in China’s transformations and
underestimate its continued agency in Chinese economic takeoffs.
The above discussion also suggests that suzhi discourse and neoliberalism “should be
seen as belonging to the same general theoretical category—circulating forms of
governmentality each with a range of associated techniques and practices, sometimes
sincerely and sometimes disingenuously applied” (Kipnis 2007, 395). As one of the
discourses of Chinese disingenuous neoliberalism, suzhi is both liberal and nonliberal,
neoliberal and anti-neoliberal, hierarchical and authoritarian. As an actually
existing neoliberalism and postsocialism, China exemplifies the complexities of
contextual embeddedness and incoherence of neoliberal developmentalism. This topic
requires more nuanced discussion and calculated debate than the scope of this essay
permits. The following extract from David Harvey (2007, 42) has laid the ground for
further discussions of neoliberalism, with or without a qualifier (Chinese) or a prefix
(post):
The neoliberal emphasis upon individual rights and the increasingly
authoritarian use of state power to sustain the system become a flashpoint of
contentiousness. The more neoliberalism is recognized as a failed if not
disingenuous and utopian project masking the restoration of class power, the
more it lays the basis for a resurgence of mass movements voicing egalitarian
political demands, seeking economic justice, fair trade, and greater economic
security and democratization.
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