Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of `market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a `floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadre-capitalist class simultaneously blur the `state'/`market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The conclusion is that contemporary China is not becoming `neoliberal' in either a strong or weak sense, nor undergoing a process of neoliberalization, but instead shows the emergence of an oligarchic corporate state and Party whose legitimacy is being challenged by disenfranchised classes, but is still in control through its efforts at modernization.
Anagnost, Ann (2004) `The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)', Public Culture16: 189-208.
2.
Breslin, Shaun (2006) `Serving the Market or Serving the Party: Neo-liberalism in China', in R. Robison (ed.) The Neo-liberal Revolution: Forging the Market State, pp. 114-34. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
3.
Brødsgaard, Kjeld Erik and Yongnian Zheng (2006) The Chinese Communist Party in Reform. London: Routledge.
4.
Cai, Yongshun (2006) `The Weakening of Workers' Power in China', in Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and Yongnian Zheng (eds) The Chinese Communist Party in Reform, pp. 173-91. London; New York : Routledge.
5.
Clarke, John (2004) Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy. London: SAGE.
6.
DeMartino, George (2000) Global Economy, Global Justice: Theoretical Objections and Policy Alternatives to Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge.
7.
Deyo, Fredric (1992) `The Political Economy of Social Policy Formation' , in Richard Appelbaum and Jeffrey Henderson (eds) States and Development in the Asian Pacific Rim, pp. 288-306. London: SAGE.
8.
Dicken, Peter (1998) Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy. New York: Guilford Press.
9.
Dickson, Bruce J. (2004) `Dilemmas of Party Adaptation: The CCP's Strategies for Survival', in Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen (eds) State and Society in 21st-century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation, pp. 141-58. Asia's Transformations series. New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
10.
Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta (2002) `Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality', American Ethnologist29: 981-1002.
11.
Fröbel, Folker, Jürgen Heinrichs and Otto Kreve (1980) The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
12.
Gill, Stephen (1995) `Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism', Millennium: Journal of International Studies24(3): 399-423.
13.
Gledhill, John (2004) `Neoliberalism', in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, pp. 332-48. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
14.
Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky (2001) New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States. New York: New York University Press.
15.
Gordon, Colin (1991) `Governmental Rationality: An Introduction', in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 1-52. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
16.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International Publishers.
17.
Greenhalgh, Susan and Edwin A. Winckler (2005) Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
18.
Gries, Peter Hays and Stanley Rosen (2004) `Introduction: Popular Protest and State Legitimation in 21st-century China', in Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen (eds) State and Society in 21st-century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation , pp. 1-23. Asia's Transformations series. New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
19.
Guan, X.P. (2001) `Globalization, Inequality and Social Policy: China on the Threshold of Entry into the World Trade Organization', Social Policy & Administration35(3): 242-57.
20.
Hall, Stuart (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
21.
Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
22.
Harvey, David (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
23.
Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
24.
Heimer, Maria (2006) `The Cadre Responsibility System and the Changing Needs of the Party', in Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and Yongnian Zheng (eds) The Chinese Communist Party in Reform, pp. 122-38. London: Routledge.
25.
Holland, Dorothy C., Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick, Thaddeus Guldbrandsen et al. (2007) Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics. New York: New York University Press.
26.
Hsing, You-tien (1997) `Building Guanxi Across the Straits: Taiwanese Capital and Local Chinese Bureaucrats', in Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (eds) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism , pp. 143-66. New York: Routledge.
27.
Kahn, Joseph (2006) `A Sharp Debate Erupts in China over Ideologies' , New York Times 12 March: 54.
28.
Kingfisher, Catherine Pélissier (1996) Women in the American Welfare Trap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
29.
Kingfisher, Catherine Pélissier (2002) Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women's Poverty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
30.
Kipnis, Andrew B. (1997) Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
31.
Kipnis, Andrew B. (2007a) Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy or Technologies of Governing?Canberra: Australian National University.
32.
Kipnis, Andrew B. (2007b) `Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People's Republic of China', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 13: 383-400.
33.
Klein, Naomi (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.
34.
Liew, L.H. (2001) `What Is to Be Done? WTO, Globalisation and State-Labour Relations in China', Australian Journal of Politics and History47(1): 39-60.
35.
Liew, L.H. (2005) `China's Engagement with Neo-liberalism: Path Dependency, Geography and Party Self-reinvention', Journal of Development Studies41(2): 331-52.
36.
Lin, Chun (2006) The Transformation of Chinese Socialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
37.
Lu, X.B. (1997) `The Politics of Peasant Burden in Reform China' , Journal of Peasant Studies25(1): 113-38.
38.
Maskovsky, Jeff, and Catherine Pélissier Kingfisher (2001) `Introduction: Globalization', Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development30: 105-13.
39.
Meisner, Maurice (1999) Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic, 3rd edn. New York: The Free Press.
40.
Morgen, Sandra and Jeff Maskovsky (2003) `The Anthropology of Welfare "Reform": New Perspectives on US Urban Poverty in the Post-welfare Era', Annual Review of Anthropology32: 315-38.
41.
Naughton, Barry (2007) The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
42.
Nonini, Donald M. (1997) `"Nothing Could Be Finer": Selling Globalization in North Carolina', paper delivered at the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, November.
43.
Nonini, Donald M. and Aihwa Ong (1997) `Introduction: Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity', in Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (eds) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, pp. 1-33. New York : Routledge.
44.
Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality . Durham, NC: Duke University Press .
45.
Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell (2002) `Neoliberalizing Space', Antipode34(3): 380-404.
46.
Pieke, Frank N. (2004) `Contours of an Anthropology of the Chinese State: Political Structure, Agency and Economic Development in Rural China', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute10(3): 517-38.
47.
Pun, Ngai (2003) `Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in "Globalizing" China', Cultural Anthropology18: 469-92.
48.
Rofel, Lisa (2007) Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
49.
Saad-Filho, Alfredo and Deborah Johnston (2005) Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press.
50.
Scott, James C. (1976) The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
51.
Scott, James C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
52.
Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta (2006) `Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization', in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds) The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, pp. 1-42. Blackwell Readers in Anthropology 9. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
53.
Skinner, G. William (1977) `Introduction: Urban Social Structure in Ch'ing China', in G. William Skinner (ed.) The City in Late Imperial China, pp. 521-53. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
54.
Smart, Alan (1997) `Oriental Despotism and Sugar-coated Bullets: Representations of the Market in China', in James G. Carrier (ed.) Meanings of the Market, pp. 159-94. New York: Berg.
55.
Smart, Josephine and Alan Smart (1999) `Personal Relations and Divergent Economies: A Case Study of Hong Kong Investment in South China', in Setha Low (ed.) Theorizing the City, pp. 169-200. New York: Routledge.
56.
So, Alvin Y. (2005) `Beyond the Logic of Capital and the Polarization Model: The State, Market Reforms, and the Plurality of Class Conflict in China' , Critical Asian Studies37(3): 481-94.
57.
Solinger, Dorothy J. (2002) `The Floating Population in the Cities: Markets, Migration, and the Prospects for Citizenship', in Susan D. Blum and Lionel M. Jensen (eds) China off Center: Mapping the Middle Margins of the Middle Kingdom , pp. 273-90. Manoa: University of Hawai'i Press.
58.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton.
59.
The Economist (2005) `The Cauldron Boils; Protests in China', 29 September: 7.
60.
Thompson, E.P. (1971) `The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present50: 79-136.
61.
Walder, Andrew (2006) `The Party Elite and China's Trajectory of Change' , in Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and Yongnian Zheng (eds) The Chinese Communist Party in Reform, pp. 15-32. London: Routledge .
62.
Wang, Hui (2003) China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, trans. Theodore Huters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
63.
Wedeman, Andrew (2002) `State Predation and Rapid Growth: Politicization of Business in China', in Edmund Terence Gomez (ed.) Political Business in East Asia, pp. 155-81. London : Routledge.
64.
Yan, Hairong (2003) `Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks', Cultural Anthropology18: 493-523.
65.
Yan, Yunxiang (1996) The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
66.
Yang, Jie (2008) `The Politics of "Dangan": Spectralization, Spatialization and Interpellation in China', presentation to the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina , Chapel Hill, 25 February.
67.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui (1994) Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
68.
Zhang, L.i (2001) Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
