China’s New Order and Past Disorders: A Dialogue Starting from Wang Hui's Analysis

The essay develops a series of reflection on contemporary politics starting from Wang Hui’s analyses in “China’s New Order” (Harvard UP, 2004) of the role that the repression of the spring 1989 movement played in the acceleration of China’s neo-liberalist economic policies and more in general about the peculiar forms of intervention of the party-state in the implementation of capitalist forms of economy. Four major issues are discussed: some probings of the political value of the Tian’anmen movement; the suppression of the agricultural people’s communes; the parallel transformation of the industrial “danwei” system; and the rise of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy as a form of reactive subjectivity toward the political experiments of the late sixties and early seventies. The authors argue that the major consistency in the Chinese state today is the process of harsh depolitization of subjectivities deployed during the Cultural Revolution and retrospectively throughout the entire 20th century in China. On the other hand, this process of depolitization shows a weakness in consistency, since it basically depends on a “radical negation” and, in the end, lacks autonomous subjective strength.