The Great Separation Book Launch | Q&A with coeditor Yang Zhang

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 edited Q&A transcript, Dr. Zhang discussed Xu's concept of ordoeconomism and how it differs from neoliberalism, what the Cultural Revolution explains about China's reform-era development model, and what kind of scholar Xu was.

Yang Zhang is a coeditor of The Great Separation and an associate professor in the Department of Global Inquiry at American University. His research covers the areas of comparative historical sociology, contentious politics, political economy, social networks, sociology of knowledge, and social theory.

What is ordoeconomism? How does it contribute to the studies on China's post-socialist transformation?

According to Xiaohong’s definition, ordoeconomism means an ideology that valorizes economic development, rejects mass politics, and views the state as the apolitical guardian of the economy. It is not an entirely new concept. Some scholars who study Germany use ordoeconomism to describe the German model after World War II. Michel Foucault also has some lectures on ordoliberalism to describe European economic models, such as in France. There are some similar concepts, such as neoliberalism.

In the Chinese literature, another concept you can think of is the “disinterested government” (中性政府). What that means is that the Chinese state is not political, and the Chinese state's focus is on economic development since the 1990s. Politicians don't fight over ideology anymore and they only fight over policymaking. That's the secret of China's economic development. Economists use the “disinterested government” as a positive concept to discuss China's development, but Xiaohong is unhappy with that.

Ordoeconomism means a developmental model in which leaders primarily care about economic development and separate the economy from mass politics. I think Xiaohong's central message is that we should never underestimate the negative consequences of the depoliticized economic development model. The depoliticization of the system makes any collective political deliberation difficult or even impossible. Even though it made some short-term economic achievements in China's reform in the 1990s and early 2000s, the separation of political participation from the people had long-term consequences for China's sustainable and people-centered development. Xiaohong believes that we should bring politics back in.

How does ordoeconomism connect with and differ from neoliberalism, the term many Western scholars use to describe China's reform?

Leftist scholars tend to use neoliberalism to characterize China's reform. David Harvey, a critical geographer, has a book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. He listed Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Paul Volcker as four major constructors of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Neoliberalism in the United States and the United Kingdom means deregulation, marketization, financialization, underestimating the importance of politics, and separating popular political participation [from economic decisions].

Those are somewhat similar to China's development model, because China has been joining the globalization project since the 1970s. That's why famous scholars like David Harvey use neoliberalism to characterize China's development model. But Xiaohong says we should make some conceptual distinction between the neoliberal development model of the United Kingdom and the United States and ordoeconomism in China. The two things are connected, but they are not entirely the same thing.

For one thing, China is not a liberal democracy. And ordoeconomism is still different from UK or U.S. neoliberalism. In the United Kingdom and the United States there were mass politics and social movements. In China, you don't see sustainable social movements.

What does the concept reveal about the timing of China's turn, relative to the neoliberal turn in the United States and the United Kingdom?

Ho-fung Hung made it very clear in his introduction, and I fully agree: Xiaohong says China had ordoeconomism as early as the 1960s and 1970s. It's before neoliberalism in the United States and the United Kingdom. That means China's economic model was not just influenced by the United States and the United Kingdom after the Reform, as people have often believed. In the late 1970s and 1980s, when the capitalist world and China encountered each other, both sides had already had their domestic origins. It's not a one-way influence; it's a mutual interaction.

There is an internal dynamism. The failure of the Cultural Revolution in the early years became the political origin of China's ordoeconomism. So the China model of development is not just a global project; it is first of all a domestic political project. 

I think this could be controversial. Some people don't agree with that. I'm not fully persuaded by his argument, but this is what Xiaohong wanted to do: change the narrative of the temporal order and the spatial relationship between the two different units [China and the West].

What are Xiaohong's main contributions to Cultural Revolution studies?

In recent years, I think Cultural Revolution studies by sociologists have become more and more trivial and narrative-based. Xiaohong was unhappy with the situation for a number of reasons.

First, he wanted the sociological study of the Cultural Revolution to be more theoretical. That means the case of the Cultural Revolution can directly contribute to and engage in dialogue with sociological literature. His articles on the CR have been cited by many sociologists who never study China. That means people valued his sociological contributions.

Second, he wanted to show that there is a meta-narrative about how the Cultural Revolution influenced China's development model in the 1980s, 1990s, and even today. He spent a lot of time reading those archival documents and trying to get the Cultural Revolution story right, but he focuses on the meta narrative rather than local narratives of the CR. 

Third, Xiaohong didn't take the Cultural Revolution as a separate historical unit for analysis. He tried to problematize the conventional wisdom and the popular discourses by linking Cultural Revolution events to the larger historical picture. Xiaohong wanted to make a case that you don't need to be either sociological or historical; you don't need to be either theoretical or empirical. You could and should be both. He believed, and I also believed, as do a lot of historical sociologists in our generation, that if we want to produce good work, we need to be both good sociological thinkers and historical researchers.