China Beyond Socialism and Capitalism

* Book: Keyu Jin. The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. (2023)

URL = https://www.keyujin.com/

Contextual Quote

“Even sophisticated Americans possessed only a simplistic understanding of life in China […] But the China they imagined was far from the one that I knew from my everyday life there — not to mention that by 1997 seismic shifts were already under way. People’s excitement and hopes were bubbling over as we debated new economic reforms, our bid for the Olympics, joining the WTO, privatizing state-owned companies, and adopting Western technology and business models. In school, our political science textbooks were constantly being revised, as Marxist thought gradually morphed into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ […] To my European colleagues, exactly what role the Communist Party plays in a seemingly thriving capitalist economy has always been a mystery. To my American friends, China’s dynamic entrepreneurialism seems wholly incompatible with its people’s deference to authority”.

- Keyu Jin [1]

Discussion

Was Maoism a rupture in China’s imperial past, or a response to its negation by modernity?

Tara van Dijk:

"Was it a vanishing mediator that cleared the ground for “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or the transitional formation through which a new civilizational confidence could crystallize? And what if the CCP’s deepest continuity is neither socialist nor capitalist, but imperial — a party-state that has inherited the cognitive, administrative, and symbolic structures of the Sino Empire now mediated by twenty-first century productive forces?

On this imperial template in Chinese governance, Vivienne Shue warrants a long quotation:

“Insulted, invaded, and occupied by foreign powers China was, to be sure. But it was never conquered. It never lost its independence as a state […] The hypothesis to be elaborated and advanced here is that focusing firmly on all the far-reaching consequences of China’s oddly intact transfiguration — from dynastic empire to republic, and then to people’s republic — will have valuable light to shed on how the Communist Party has gone about governing the country since 1949. Imperial knowledges, sensibilities, and modalities of social ordering have not hung on in China merely as ‘legacies’ or quaint ‘vestiges’ — sundry remainders of a vanished history, at best only tangentially relevant now to the quickened pace of ‘real’ politics and of ‘modern’ society. These modalities have, rather, entered into Party-state leaders’ strategic governing choices and techniques of rule, and into the fields of opportunity that have been opened or closed to Chinese people, in ways so profound and, over time, so powerfully constitutive of the evolving polity itself, that we can be forgiven if sometimes we misperceive them as natural givens in the way the system works.”

Maoism, in this light, can be understood not simply as “Marxism applied to China,” but as a response to the rupture of modernity — the material form that emerged from insult, invasion, and occupation. Maoism fused Marxist categories with peasant insurrection, national liberation, mass mobilization, and an unambiguous project of forging a new Chinese subjectivity or identity.

Now, as the Owl of Minerva circles over the long twentieth century, it becomes possible to see Maoism as a vanishing mediator between the “century of humiliation” and a century of civilizational vindication. To name Maoism thus is not to deny its revolutionary or emancipatory moments, nor to claim a predetermined capitalist outcome. It is simply to acknowledge that Maoism cleared the ground for what followed and opened political, institutional, and libidinal space.

This ongoing, open, historical dialectic is the subject of Keyu Jin’s1 The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (2023):

“Even sophisticated Americans possessed only a simplistic understanding of life in China […] But the China they imagined was far from the one that I knew from my everyday life there — not to mention that by 1997 seismic shifts were already under way. People’s excitement and hopes were bubbling over as we debated new economic reforms, our bid for the Olympics, joining the WTO, privatizing state-owned companies, and adopting Western technology and business models. In school, our political science textbooks were constantly being revised, as Marxist thought gradually morphed into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ […] To my European colleagues, exactly what role the Communist Party plays in a seemingly thriving capitalist economy has always been a mystery. To my American friends, China’s dynamic entrepreneurialism seems wholly incompatible with its people’s deference to authority” (emphasis mine).

It was a bitch, a long haul, but China got her groove back. Yet this presents a problem for both Marxist and bourgeois thinkers and influencers alike, because China’s new groove fits neither the liberal nor the socialist box particularly well. Its neither/nor (or both/and) character produces real anxiety among Marxist–Leninists whose twentieth-century conceptual frameworks cannot account for twenty-first-century China. Much has changed, but their discourse remains fixed.2

The CCP can still speak Marxism, of course. But its walk resembles that of an East Asian developmental state, closer to Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) than to a workers’ state or a dictatorship of the proletariat presiding over a withering state. This does not mean China is “just like” Singapore. It shows that developmental-state logics cut across the socialist–capitalist binary itself.

China today is externally perceived through two contradictory codes or frameworks: socialism and capitalism. Marxist–Leninists respond not with a dialectical materialist analysis of this parallax gap but by disavowing it. China is socialist—super-Marxist! It has to be, because if it is not, their ideology loses its center or quilting point and collapses. China thus becomes the sublime object, the last symbolic guarantee that socialism exists somewhere and that history still has a telos."

(https://morbidsymptom.substack.com/p/china-parallax-socialism-and-capitalism)

Note on the author

Tara van Dijk writes:

"Keju Jin was born in Beijing. She attended high school and then Harvard University in the United States. She recently moved from the London School of Economics to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her father, Jin Liqun, is the current president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and a former vice minister of finance of China. I mention this to note that the Party clearly has no issue with her characterization of contemporary China. Her father is a longtime CCP member, and there have been no denunciations or distancing. Far from it, she has even been invited to serve on the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), despite not being a CCP member."

(https://morbidsymptom.substack.com/p/china-parallax-socialism-and-capitalism)