Neo-socialist governmentality: managing freedom in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes ‘neo-socialist governmentality’ as a set of rationalities of governance that aim to shape, nurture, constrain and guide the autonomy of Chinese subjects in the post-revolutionary era. Contrasting neo-liberal and neo-socialist governmentalities, we outline the mechanisms of translation and coordination that open, appropriate and restrain spaces for the pluralistic problematization of concerns for the self, culture and society. Focusing on the discourses and institutions of ‘constructing spiritual civilization’ and drawing on research conducted among a range of voluntary groups, we highlight the productive tensions inherent to the neo-socialist aim of fusing the centrifugal forces of socialist, market and Chinese civilizational subjectivities and authorities. Our case points to the value of theorizing distinct forms of governmentality associated with different historical trajectories and socio-political systems.

Keywords:

• China
• post-socialism
• neo-socialism
• neo-liberalism
• governmentality
• spiritual civilization
• ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

David A. Palmer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8073-9080

Notes

1 A symposium co-organized by organizations representing the academic and religious communities of Environmental Science, Philosophy and Daoism in November 2018.

2 Here, for lack of space, we will not focus on the rise of expert authorities in the various fields of the social sciences and social development, which is an essential dimension of this shift in rationalities of governance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund [grant number HKU 751110H], and the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme.

Notes on contributors

David A. Palmer

David A. Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. After completing his PhD at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Université de Paris PSL), he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the LSE in 2003–2004. He is best known for his award-winning books Qigong fever: Body, science and utopia in China (Columbia, 2007) and The religious question in modern China (co-authored with V. Goossaert, Chicago, 2011), both of which have become essential reading for studies on contemporary Chinese society and religion. His latest book Dream trippers: Global Daoism and the predicament of modern spirituality (co-authored with E. Siegler) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. His current projects include researching the cultivation of selfhood and autonomy under Chinese neo-socialism.

Fabian Winiger

Fabian Winiger obtained his PhD at the University of Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018. He completed a MSc. in Medical Anthropology at Oxford University and has been a Visiting Graduate Student at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. His research followed the transnational circulation of East Asian techniques of body-cultivation and their attendant neo-socialist, cultural-nationalist and alternative medical discourses. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Zürich, where he works on the intersection of spirituality and global health in the WHO.