With a keen attention to how culture and elite conflict shape politics, The Great Separation upends deterministic understandings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the market reforms that followed. This ambitious posthumous volume by sociologist Xiaohong Xu turns the existing scholarship on China’s “neoliberalism” on its head by demonstrating that the effort to separate mass politics from economic policy had its origins well before the Reform and Opening-up era.
In this interview, Dr. Livne discussed the editing process of this posthumous work, how ordoeconomism challenges the conventional wisdom of neoliberalism, and contributes to the studies of economic sociology and sociology of knowledge. He also shared his memories of Xiaohong, and how they developed a close friendship.
Roi Livne is a coeditor of The Great Separation and associate professor of sociology at University of Michigan. His research is situated at the intersection of the new sociology of morality, the sociology of culture, science and technology studies, medical sociology, and economic sociology.
What motivated you to take on the book editing project?
Xiaohong did. About a week before he died, still in the hospital, maybe a day or two after he learned for a fact that he was dying, at around 4 a.m., Xiaohong told me that he was very disappointed he didn't get to finish his book.
This needs context. Xiaohong walked a very long path in his life. He was born in rural China to a family of modest means. He left his home at 12. Xiaohong started at this village and reached places like Peking University, Yale and the University of Michigan. So for him, dying before he was able to complete his work and mark a certain end to this journey was a real disappointment.
Don’t get me wrong, in his last days Xiaohong thought about many things. He thought and spoke about his family. About friends. About students. But he was also thinking a lot about the book. He felt that he needed to have it published in order to be able to look at his entire life as a path that in some way, even if not an entirely satisfying way, reached a conclusion, a destination.
I knew that Rob Jansen, Yang Zhang and I could do this for him. It took us almost three years, but Xiaohong now has a book with his name on it, and people will read it. Some will agree and some disagree– this is exactly what Xiaohong wanted. I am happy that we managed to do it for him.
How did you edit the manuscript?
Xiaohong gave very clear instructions. He wanted it to be a book on the Cultural Revolution. There was “The Great Separation,” an article that had not been published before, and two other pieces that had already been published in Critical Historical Studies and Sociological Theory (with Isaac Reed).
Xiaohong gave me access to his harddrive, which had the entire history of the revisions of these articles. He said that when he revised “The Great Separation” for the American Sociological Review, there was a part that he really liked and had to remove, because he needed to shorten the paper before submission. He wanted this part back. We identified it and did as he asked. As for the rest, I shared all versions of the paper with the two other editors, and we put together a plan on how to work. And then, once I managed to secure permission to reprint the two other articles and finalized the connection with the University of Michigan Press, we started working on the actual manuscript.
About the rest of the experience I wrote in the book’s introduction. The moment a person passes away, the words that he left acquire a certain weight. They feel sacred. I was looking at the text and thinking, “what would Xiaohong want me to do?” Even when it was clear to me that he would have wanted me to make this or that edit, I felt reluctant to change his original words. It was emotionally difficult.
Eventually, we supported and empowered each other to make the necessary copyedits. We also re-added the paragraphs he had to remove from the article and wanted back. But the main guiding principle for us as editors was to change as little as we possibly could, because that's what Xiaohong requested. The text that was eventually published is really a Xiaohong text. That was our goal and I think that we achieved it. We worked very well as editors and ultimately agreed on everything.
Why the University of Michigan Press?
I talked to Mary Gallagher, who was the director of the International Institute back then and editor of the China Understandings Today series at U-M Press. She said that U-M Press would understand the project and be open to the condition Xiaohong had set: not revising the text extensively. Then I had a great conversation with Marcella Landri, the Press’s acquiring editor. She immediately understood our needs and our limits.
Publishing with U-M Press had a second advantage, which is that the manuscript will be open-access. Given that many of the potential readers of this manuscript live and work in East Asia and not all libraries there can easily purchase the book, having the manuscript accessible worldwide for free as a PDF was a major consideration.
Lastly, there was a more symbolic consideration. Xiaohong was a University of Michigan faculty member, both in the Center for Chinese Studies and in Sociology. This university was his home in his last years. He had a community here. Having his book published by the University of Michigan Press felt right.
All of these considerations coalesced into the decision to go with U-M Press. Looking back, it is clear to me that we made the right decision.
How does the book challenge the conventional understanding of neoliberalism?
Ho-fung Hung makes an extremely interesting, adventurous and original argument in the foreword of the book: In the early 1970s, the period that everybody in the West treats as the dawn of neoliberalism, when Milton Friedman was sending his boys to Chile and a little bit before Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism in the U.S. took off, neoliberalism and ordoliberalism weren’t that popular. Actually, it seemed like capitalism was losing the cold war! Ho-fung reminds us that Friedman had difficulties finding a single good example for the success of market capitalism anywhere in the world. When you read Freedom to Choose, you see that Friedman had to go as far as Hong Kong to find an empirical case that purportedly supported his model, and, well, his analysis of Hong Kong was absurdly inaccurate.
Ho-fung makes the point that, if you take Xiaohong’s work seriously, you see that it is not that the Chinese imported neoliberalism from the UK and the U.S. It's almost the opposite. Deng Xiaoping’s denunciation of the Cultural Revolution reverberated throughout the world and ultimately led to the complete delegitimation of the Stalinist bureaucratic state. It was only then that neoliberalism became the so-called only alternative, readily embraced by the left and the right and applied… well, everywhere. So, this book basically turns the entire world history on its head.
What does the book contribute to economic sociology and sociology of knowledge?
The Great Separation, the title of the book, plays on Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation. He's engaging Polanyi throughout the book’s main chapter, and Polanyi is one of the main and classical figures in the field of economic sociology. I think Xiaohong is applying Polanyi in a very intriguing and original way, using him to analyze the evolving distinction between politics and economics in China.
It's also a sociology of knowledge argument. From my perspective, the Great Separation is in dialogue with Timothy Mitchell and his book Rule of Experts. Originally, Mitchell argued that this separate, distinguishable social sphere that people call “the economy" was created by experts, largely economists and accountants. Around the 1930s these experts introduced various tools of calculation, means of measurement, and techniques of management, which resulted in an effect: something that everybody sees and identifies as the national economy.
I think that Xiaohong, when studying the Chinese case, shows that this fabrication, or essentialization of the economy can begin in a completely different way, through political maneuvers rather than expert practices. This would be the contribution that I see to economic sociology and specifically to scholarship on economic knowledge.
What did Xiaohong originally envision for the monograph he hoped to write?
Xiaohong was planning to expand chapter 3, “The Great Separation,” into an entire book. This is also how this chapter should be read. The chapter is essentially a book written in very broad brush strokes. If Xiaohong had had the time, he would have developed The Great Separation’s sections, and even paragraphs, into complete chapters that would add up into a book.
My sense is that it would not have been a Theda Skocpol type of book that compares different revolutions. Maybe he would have used comparisons strategically, but I don't think he would have delved into them as deeply as he delved into the Cultural Revolution. Although, look, he was an ambitious person. Maybe he would have done it eventually. Who knows?
How did you first meet Xiaohong and become close friends?
We met at a social gathering in the summer of 2019, shortly after he joined our department. We realized we had daughters close in age, and we introduced them to each other. We hung out with our partners and with our daughters several times that semester.
The last time I saw him and his family before COVID was at their first condo in Ann Arbor. COVID was already spreading in China and we were talking a lot about the situation there.Then some time later, boom, the sky fell on everybody's head here and everything shut down. But we talked, and the girls were in touch with each other. One day, Lang, his wife, caught their daughter speaking to squirrels in their backyard. She realized that their daughter missed the company of children so much that she was trying to befriend squirrels! The situation was not very different with my daughter, so we decided to basically merge our households. When the school year started, we began homeschooling our daughters together. For the entire COVID period, maybe a year and a half, Xiaohong and Lang were the only two adults that we saw in-person every day. My daughter slept a couple of days a week at their place, and their daughter slept in our house regularly. The girls were like sisters. We all developed a very close friendship.
Then, in the midst of all that, he got the cancer diagnosis, which extended the COVID experience for him and us. We all had to be careful, because he was immunocompromised. I think this was one reason why the friendship became so deep and intense. I met Xiaohong in 2019. He died in 2023. It's only four years, but it's four years in which we were really the main people in each others’ lives.
What kind of scholar and person was Xiaohong?
Because of COVID, I saw him almost every day, but I didn't see him in his social circles. And it was only when he was dying and I saw this stream of people coming here, emailing and calling him (and me), and offering all kinds of support that I understood what a gregarious person Xiaohong was and how much he meant to so many people. I was sitting by his hospital bed reading emails to him. He and I had common friends that I didn't even know about. We also got emails from people who were not friends of his, some didn’t even know him personally, like students in China who wanted to apply to graduate school in the U.S. and sent an inquiry to him. Xiaohong was writing and talking to them, investing tremendous amounts of time, just because he wanted to help other people who aspired to walk that path that he managed to walk. People remember such things. There was one graduate student who talked to him once and didn't get admitted to our program. She heard on social media that Xiaohong was not doing well and immediately wrote an email.
That's a part of Xiaohong I learned about only when he was dying. It was incredible to see how many people knew him. He made me feel like China was a really small place.
But I think that the best account of the person and scholar Xiaohong was is in the essay Lang Chen published shortly after Xiaohong left us. It was a brilliant and honest tribute to a person who genuinely wanted to be good–wanted to be good for his family, wanted to be good in general and wanted to be a good scholar–but lived in the harsh reality of our academic world. I prefer this description to any attempt to put Xiaohong on a pedestal and idolize him as if he was a saint. Xiaohong’s charm and the beauty of his personality were in his imperfections. He was a person who saw the flaws in the world and in himself, acknowledged them, and refused to give up.
This is why I think that Lang’s essay did justice to Xiaohong and who he really was - an exceptionally warm person who truly cared about people. He would drop everything selflessly to help someone. And he also fiercely believed in intellectual life, almost to a fault. There was not a trace of cynicism in him. Ever. It's very hard to find an academic who is not a little bit cynical about their work, saying that nobody would ever read it and the few who would wouldn’t actually understand it. From here, the way to thinking that your work doesn’t truly matter is very short. Xiaohong, on the other hand, wrote as if every word he typed had the potential to change the world, maybe not in a practical way, but in an existential way for sure. He believed his words and his ideas could reveal inner truths about the world, which had value even if few read and fewer understood them. This is why he was so serious about sociology. This is what drove him until his very last moments.
How did the idea for Xiaohong's memorial fellowship take shape, and why does it focus on international students working on China?
These particular ideas are Elizabeth Armstrong's, Michigan Sociology’s Department Chair. Very shortly after Xiaohong passed away, she started fundraising for the fellowship. What she had in mind is that the best way to honor Xiaohong was creating a path for people who have a similar life trajectory - international students doing work on China or similar topics, which he cared about. Now we have fabulous people like Prof. Bolun Zhang from Zhejiang University and Prof. Yan Long from UC Berkeley, who are turning the fundraiser into an international drive. They’re giving me a déjà vu to those heartwarming days when Xiaohong’s friends from literally all around the world gathered to support him and his family.
It is going to be a fellowship that will be open not only to sociology students, but also other students at U-M who meet its conditions. If we manage to have a successful fundraiser, this fellowship will also be generous enough to make a difference in the trajectory of graduate students. So we would be able to support future students who are interested in the topics that Xiaohong was interested in, and come from life circumstances and life trajectories that Xiaohong came from. Each of these students would carry Xiaohong’s memory and continue his legacy here at the University of Michigan.
I think that this fellowship and the book are very beautiful ways to keep Xiaohong alive among us. The book already exists. Now I hope people will help us bring the fellowship into existence.
