Competing Hegemonic Projects within China's Variegated Capitalism: ‘Liberal’ Guangdong vs. ‘Statist’ Chongqing

Abstract

This article investigates the variegated model of capitalism emerging in China through a comparative analysis of two contrasting local government approaches developed in Chongqing and Guangdong. From 2007 to 2012, elite politicians and intellectuals articulated the Chongqing and Guangdong models as contradictory visions for China. Drawing on a three-pronged conceptual framework developed by Bob Jessop, the article de- and reconstructs this dichotomy which has been embraced by some Western scholars. It is argued, first, that the two models involve complimentary accumulation strategies: as Guangdong moves up global value chains, Chongqing takes over many of its low-wage jobs in manufacturing sectors. Second, however, the two models do entail contrasting state projects. Guangdong's local government opened up more space for civil society organisations than normally allowed, whereas Chongqing's administrators reinforced China's state-led development path. Finally, it is highlighted how this difference between state projects is reflected in two antagonistic hegemonic visions for China's national development, illustrated by the populism of former Chongqing Party Chief Bo Xilai vs. the pro-business stance of his Guangdong counterpart Wang Yang. Future studies should expand upon the key theoretical insight of the paper: that the emergent variegated capitalism approach to political–economic analysis needs a stronger ideational component.

Keywords:

• variegated capitalism
• hegemonic projects
• Guangdong model
• Chongqing model
• Wang Yang
• Bo Xilai
• Bob Jessop

Notes on contributor

Andreas Mulvad is a PhD Fellow in the Department of Political Science at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His PhD dissertation investigates the relationship between capitalism and democracy in China in a historical sociological perspective with an emphasis on ideational politics.

Notes

1. According to population estimates from the 2010 census of the National Bureau of Statistics of China (2011), the municipality of Chongqing had a population of ca. 29 million, whereas the province of Guangdong had a population of around 104 million.

2. In a politically charged debate such as this one, the epistemological line which separates fact-seeking scholarship from self-consciously ideological contributions is blurry. However, some contributors seem to have – quite intentionally – strayed further than others from the ideal of value-neutral description with no other motive than the pursuit of objective ‘truth’. In particular, Cui Zhiyuan, a well-known ‘New Left’ intellectual, deliberately shunned academic detachment by taking a sabbatical in 2010 from Tsinghua University to work as assistant to the chairman of Chongqing's State Asset Commission (Huang 2011: 611). Cui provides an exemplary case of an intentionally performative knowledge ambition of co-producing a desired reality through describing it. Indeed, in an interview, Cui (2010) has pointed out that one of his key tasks was to provide ‘theoretical justification' for the ongoing experiments, thus helping the Chongqing administrators to ‘see the bigger picture' and appreciate the full implications of what they were doing and (Cui 2010: 8–9).

3. Xiao Bin is a Professor at the School of Government at the Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

4. Interestingly, Bo's remarks were inconsistent with remarks published earlier in the year by Cui Zhiyuan and another prominent left-wing intellectual, Wang Shaoguang (Ferchen 2013).

5. In fact, even before international media began to focus on the Chongqing–Guangdong schism, two prominent Western intellectuals, Friedman (2008) and Kuhn (2009), had been involved in articulating Guangdong's innovative approach – the former of whom, at least, on Wang Yang's personal invitation. While Friedman (2008) focused on Guangdong as a potential first mover for a transition to a sustainablegreen growth model in China, Kuhn (2009) – a long-time advisor to and biographer of top individuals in China's national leadership (Kuhn 2009) – highlighted Wang's plans of innovation-enhancing industrial upgrading.

6. To the extent that it is valid to make a sharp distinction between domestic Chinese debates and ‘international’ debates, the criteria which sets the two apart is a linguistic one: By ‘domestic Chinese debates’, I refer to contributions or interventions published in Chinese, regardless of the origins and current geographical position of the author. The implication is that both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars based in Western institutions participate in Chinese domestic debates whenever they publish in Chinese. As for ‘international debates’, I refer to contributions published in any other language than Chinese.

7. Bo's downfall was initially triggered by the defection to the US Embassy in Chengdu of his assistant Wang Lijun in February 2012, followed by Bo becoming linked, through his wife Gu Kailai, to the suspicious death of English businessman Neil Heywood in a Chongqing hotel (Xiang 2012). In August 2012, Gu was handed a suspended death sentence on charges of murder (Branigan 2012). For important ‘New Left’ evaluations of the Bo Xilai scandal and the prospect of survival for the core policies of the Chongqing ‘model’, see Wang (2012) and Zhao (2012).

8. The European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR) reports on its website (2013) that its ‘founder supporter' is the Open Society Foundations. This organisation, which was established by investor George Soros, states on its website that one of its missions is to ‘ … work to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people' (Open Society Foundations 2013). The ECFR also receives support from other private foundations as well as from the European Commission, and a host of European governments (including France, Spain and Sweden) and government agencies (including the British Council and Germany's Ministry of Foreign Affairs) (ECFR 2013).

9. Lance Gore is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore (Gore 2012c). John Steinbock's employer, the India China American (ICA) Institute, reports on its website (2011) that it is a ‘non-profit organization, established to foster economic growth through Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Inclusiveness within India, China and America (ICA) and Trade and Investment between these three economies.'

10. For excellent discussions of decentralised experimentation as a proven national strategy in the People's Republic of China, see Heilmann (2008a, 2008b).

11. Some support for this assumption can be found: for Philip Huang, a prolific defender of the ‘Chongqing experiment’, the stakes of model articulation are ultimately those of altering Chinese developmental policy at the national level: In his view, ‘ … Chongqing has become a serious contender as a national policy model for China’ (Huang 2011: 609, my emphasis).

12. Jessop (1990, 2002, 2008) uses the concept ‘hegemonic project’ seemingly interchangeably with ‘hegemonic vision’. In my view, it makes sense to think of ‘hegemonic project’ rather as an overarching concept which denotes attempts to tie together into one coherent whole a specific accumulation strategy with a specific (materially enforcing) state project and a (philosophically legitimising) hegemonic vision.

13. This happened, Kuhn (2009) claims, despite initial opposition from China's premier Wen Jiabao who originally preferred a policy of heavy subsidising of Guangdong's ailing export industries. The interesting question of whether and to what extent Wang's upgrading strategy met with internal opposition from a fraction of Guangdong's class of capitalist producers – namely those industrialists in low-end assembly and manufacturing – lies outside the scope of this article.

14. According to Godement (2011: 2), Chongqing's wage cost stands at only half that of coastal zones (such as Guangdong).

15. A more detailed analysis than space allows here would be required in order to assess how and to what extent Bo Xilai managed to achieve support in business circles for his strategy. For a lucid account of parallel struggles to define Hong Kong's accumulation strategy, see Sum (2010).

16. It should be noted that while the Chongqing accumulation strategy is arguably predicated on taking over some of the functions and jobs of China's coastal zones, it is of course not simply a perfect replica of the export-based growth model developed in China's coastal zones in the 1980s. Given Chongqing's position far from the coast, and the changed structure of world markets, a simple ‘copycat’ export-based strategy would probably not be as effective in Chongqing. For instance, China's domestic market has grown much bigger over the last decades, facilitating a less export-centred strategy: In 2008, as Chongqing's investment boom took off, the export volume accounted for only 7.6 per cent of local GDP, compared with 32 per cent of GDP for China as a whole (Bo and Chen 2009). In terms of industrial make-up, Professor Yang Fan of China University of Political Science and Law (cited in Yang 2011: 5) points out that the  … traditional models of coastal regions like Guangdong are geared towards assembly and exports; the two poles of the supply chain, sources of inputs and markets for finished products, are situated outside the country … Chongqing's model for growth on the other hand, is based on local production of spare parts, upstream of assembly. For an account which strongly emphasises the novelty of Chongqing's growth model as going ‘beyond latecomer advantage’, see Cai et al. (2012).

17. ‘Civil society’ is a highly contested concept (Seligman 1995). The given space does not allow for a longer discussion of the specific definitions underlying the uses of the concept by Guangdong ‘model’ proponents such as Xiao (2012) and Gore (2012c). However, as will be shown, their ideas about the state–society relationship seem quite compatible, at least, with a classical Scottish Enlightenment notion of civil society (Ferguson 1782 [1767]) as a market-based modern social order based on private property and the rule of law.

18. These figures, while still impressive, should however be measured against an average 12.5 per cent annual rise in minimum wages nationally between 2006 and 2010, according to official data (Reuters 2012).

19. In Gore's formulation (2012b: i), the aim of the Guangdong model is to increase participation of citizens and civil society groups in governance in order to make a switch from ‘all-embracing governance’ to ‘limited governance’. But perhaps a conceptual pair developed by Mann (1984) captures the political rationale of Guangdong's state project even more precisely: Their objective is not so much to ‘limit’ the governance capacity of the state, but to qualitatively change it: By replacing despotic with infrastructural (local) state power, the local government allows ideas and opinions formulated at a distance from the state to matter relatively more in decision-making, while at the same time enhancing its legitimacy in the eyes of civil society actors.

20. Also significant is a programme which made it mandatory for leading cadres in district and counties to go to ‘live below’, to eat, live and work with the locals (Huang 2011: 605) a specific number of times a year in a manner reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution Era.

21. The strong state presence does not, however, mean that the state is advancing at the cost of the private sector. Rather, the two are growing bigger together, as Cui (2011: 654) points out. Between 2001 and 2010, the private sector's share of Chongqing's GDP thus increased from 38.8 per cent to 61.2 per cent.

22. In contrast, Guangdong province, officially home to 26 million migrant workers in 2009, though the real figure could be much higher (Zhao and Fu 2010), carried out a much less generous reform of the hukou system in 2010: This reform gives all migrant workers without a criminal record an opportunity to apply for full local citizenship, provided that they have lived in the same locality for seven consecutive years, paid social insurance fees for a full seven years, have a fixed residence, are in lawful employment or business, have paid taxes and have abided by the one-child policy (Zhao and Fu 2010: 10). The effect of this reform in terms of the number of migrants immediately qualifying for city hukou is quite limited: Zhao and Fu (Zhao and Fu 2010) note that in Shanghai where a similar reform was carried out only around 3000 migrant workers possess the required proof of residence for seven or more years, adding that ‘ … [t]he same is probably true of Guangdong’.

23. More specifically, Bo Xilai's administration pledged to decrease the Gini coefficient from 0.42 to 0.35, the ratio between urban and rural incomes to 2.5 and the ratio between Chongqing's economic centre and peripheral areas to 2 (Li 2011).

24. It is noteworthy, however, that Bo actually seems to argue here not that equity over growth is a positive value in itself, but rather that an egalitarian turn away from the current ‘indifference to people's woes' was required to avert an otherwise impending crisis of legitimacy for the CCP.

25. This view resonates with comments made by Wang Yang, in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Wukan village uprising: ‘People's democratic awareness is increasing significantly in this changing society ( … ) When their appeals for rights aren't getting enough attention, that's when mass incidents happen’ (cited from Dyer 2012).

26. Cheng Li, a prominent scholar of Chinese elite politics, is based at the Brookings Institution, a private think tank in Washington, DC, which is partly funded by US government bodies (The Brookings Institution website 2013).

27. In Li's (2012) account, ‘ … the public seems increasingly aware of the ongoing political tensions, ideological disputes, and policy differences within the leadership’. Here, ‘the public’, construed as a unitary subject, apparently has no active stake in the debates at all, and is relegated to simply observing as ‘the leadership’ tussles among itself. One does not have to normatively affirm China's current one-Party system to contend that Li's approach underestimates the role that social forces outside the state elite plays in influencing policy-making in any regime, however authoritarian. Even in the lack of efficient parliamentary checks on state executive power, it would still seem rational for Chinese elite policy-makers to orient their policy priorities around a concern for what manifest popular sentiments they can tap into to ensure support or at least acquiescence, whether for themselves or for their party in general.

28. By ‘factionalistic', I refer to the view which tends to treat the ‘models’ primarily as personal campaign vehicles for elite politicians and/or factions. By ‘societal’, I refer to a view treating the ‘models’ primarily as emergent proxies for the political will of different ideological groupings and/or social classes.

29. The outcome, incidentally, is evidently extremely negative for Bo, but also only mediocre for Wang who – disappointingly to liberal observers – did not make it to the summit of the CCP's power pyramid, the nine man ‘Standing Committee of the Politburo’ at the 2012–2013 leadership transition which saw him appointed a Vice Premier instead (Global Times 2013). The more intricate question of making sense of the wider factional, elite-network balance sheet after the Bo Xilai affair is better left to scholars of elite politics. For an excellent discussion, see Fewsmith (2012).

30. A few final observations will suffice to demonstrate that, in any case, it is by no means obvious that the ouster of Bo has led to a victory (in the form of pervasive central government acceptance) for the liberal principles of the ‘Guangdong Model’. For instance, the year 2013 has seen the unfolding of an anti-liberal media campaign, orchestrated or at least accepted by the Xi administration, which questioned the suitability of the very idea of ‘constitutionalism’ for a socialist country like China (Chiu 2013). Meanwhile, the issue of which anti-liberal parts of the ‘Chongqing Model’ have outlived Bo Xilai and to what extent is still up for discussion. For instance, Lam (2012) posits that the wave of Maoist cultural revivalism (often interpreted as a Chongqing phenomenon in foreign media) has not been quelled with the fall of Bo, but on the contrary has been embraced at least partly by many CCP leaders, including new president Xi Jinping. Callahan (2013: 83), in contrast, suggests that while the ideological ‘Red Culture’ dimension of the ‘Chongqing Model’ was quickly abandoned after Bo's removal, many of the economic policies developed in Chongqing have actually survived.