Sino-liberalism: the socialist market and the neoliberal concept of freedom

ABSTRACT

The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such as the way it challenges former distinctions made between democratic and Communist systems. This paper examines the rhetorical dimensions of Milton Friedman’s seminal text, Capitalism and freedom (1962), and demonstrates how literary analysis can make an important contribution towards our understanding of the formation of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on critiques of Chinese capitalism mounted by Zhu Wen in his 1994 short story ‘I Love Dollars’, and the essays in Yu Hua’s China in ten words collection (2011), I show the extent to which the perceived discordance between neoliberalism and socialism is grounded in bi-polar Cold War formations. This examination of neoliberal ideals across three literary genres highlights the layers of fiction, and truth, that are present equally within those designated categories of prose, non-fiction, and economic tract.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese literature
• neoliberalism
• Milton Friedman
• Zhu Wen
• Yu Hua
• freedom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The template for the Chinese transition to a market economy is often attributed to Chen Yun, one of the ‘first generation’ leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Chen devised the ‘birdcage economy’ model, where central planning imposed limits and created the ‘cage’ around the fluctuations and fluttering of the market economy ‘birds’ inside (Zhao, 2009). This metaphor of the birdcage economy has been taken up by numerous theorists as a convenient means of visualizing China’s mixed economy. It has also elicited a range of responses, with many scholars pointing out the ways in which China continues to repudiate standard neoliberal tenets. This might be seen in the refusal to follow the Washington Consensus (Mees, 2016), an overt rejection of neoliberal ideology (Tsang, 2009; Ong & Zhang, 2008) or in recognizing that Chinese market socialism follows an entirely different ruling logic from Western expressions of neoliberalism (Nonini, 2008). At the same time, there are those that see China’s free-market reforms as being very much in line with global neoliberal trends (Anagnost, 2004; Ku, 2010; Rofel, 2007) and those that see China as manifesting a new type of neoliberalism (Sigley, 2006; So & Chu, 2012). The assessment of China’s neoliberal qualities also changes depending on how ‘Chinese companies’ are defined. Yasheng Huang has observed that companies incorporated in Sinophone regions such as Hong Kong or Taiwan are often conflated into the category of ‘Chinese company’, even though they are subject to different laws than companies incorporated within Mainland China (Huang, 2008).

2. The political theorist Ross B. Emmett stresses that the University of Chicago developed a fiercely independent culture due to its founding by an entrepreneur, rather than by the church or the state, as well as its position in the American Mid West (Emmett, 2009, p. xxvii). Friedman and Chicago are so closely associated with the birth of neoliberalism that the Chilean economists who initially implemented neoliberal policies during Augusto Pinochet’s rule were referred to as the ‘Chicago Boys’, and that the editors of the volume Neoliberal Chicago nominate Chicago as ‘a paradigmatic neoliberal city’ (Bennett, Garner, & Hague, 2017, p. 4).

3. For more on the specific circumstances that fostered and allowed organized crime to thrive in Chicago during the twentieth century, see Robert M. Lombardo. Perhaps most importantly, Lombardo notes that organized crime in Chicago was representative of a larger culture of corruption that existed throughout big-city America (Lombardo, 2013, p. 207). Friedman’s universalist assumptions about the corrupting force of politics are therefore warranted, given the wider socio-cultural environment he would have observed nationwide.

4. Economic historians have been quick to point out the timeliness of a figure such as Friedman. Robert Skidelsky has argued that Friedman’s ideas held such appeal because it is the nature of human beings to crave certainty, a trait fundamentally at odds with the emphasis placed by Keynesian economics on the role of uncertainty (Skidelsky, 2010, p. 100–106). Angus Burgin, meanwhile, shows how Friedman actively cultivated a reputation as a radical, contrarian thinker who did not shy away from politics (Burgin, 2012, p. 11).

5. For more on the sentencing of Joshua Wong, see Siu (2017) and Associated Press (2017). A good summary of the various breaches that have occurred in Hong Kong’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle over the past decade, and the implications this has for the civil liberties protected by Hong Kong Basic Law is provided by Anthony Dapiran (2017).

6. Friedman conducts a more in-depth discussion of ‘equality’ in the chapter ‘Created Equal’, in Free to choose (Friedman & Friedman, 1979/1980, p. 128–149).

7. Jason McGrath provides a comprehensive explanation of the ‘Rupture’ movement and its cultural significance (McGrath, 2008).

8. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Levy see neoliberalism as indisputably containing an imperialist logic and purpose, capable of utilising more traditional imperial tools such as ‘corruption, subversion, and war’ in order to refashion governments in favour of neoliberal ideals (2011, p. 9.). Hugo Radice suggests that neoliberalism operates as an ideological justification for a new form of global capitalism (2005). There is also extensive scholarship on neoliberalism’s penchant for increasing rather than decreasing inequality, and the rather insidious way in which it seems to have corrupted the language of liberal democracy, voiding it of its ability politically to mobilise those of the lower classes. Some key examples would include the following: (Brown, 2015; Blyth, 2013; Cooper, 2008; Foucault, 2008; Hall et al., 2015; Kiely, 2010).

9. 忽悠 (hū you) is also sometimes translated as ‘to hoodwink’. Yu Hua’s essay begins with a brief lexical history of the meaning of this term (p. 203).

10. While John Stuart Mills himself did not coin the term homo oeconomicus or ‘economic man’, it is generally acknowledged that this term arose in direct response to Mill’s work, in particular, the 1836 essay ‘On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It’ (Persky 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynda Ng

Notes on contributor

Lynda Ng is an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University, Australia. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Oxford, working on a project that examined Chinese diasporic and exilic literature. She has published essays on censorship and literary value, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism. Her current research explores the relationship between literature, the nation, and the history of economics.