Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

by ‘workers, the peasantry, the intelligentsia and the national bour-

geoisie whose interests were harmonious with each other and also

with the state’. In this way workers ‘can make moral claims for

state protection, reinforcing the leadership and responsibility of

the state to those it rules’.

60

 The aim of any mass movement,

therefore, would be to make the central state live up to its revo-

lutionary mandate against foreign capitalists, private interests, and

local authorities.

Whether or not the Chinese state is currently able or willing to

live up to such moral claims and thereby retain its legitimacy is by

no means certain. In rising to the defence of a worker brought to

trial for leading a violent factory walk-out, a prominent lawyer

observed that before the revolution ‘the Communist Party stood

alongside the workers in their 

fight against capitalist exploitation,

whereas today the Communist Party is 

fighting shoulder to shoul-

der with the cold-blooded capitalists in their struggle against the

workers’.

61

 While there are several aspects of Communist Party

policy that were designed to frustrate capitalist class formation,

the party has also acceded to the massive proletarianization of

China’s workforce, the breaking of the ‘iron rice bowl’, the eviscer-

ation of social protections, the imposition of user fees, the creation

of a 

flexible labour market regime, and the privatization of assets

formerly held in common. It has created a social system where

capitalist enterprises can both form and function freely. In so doing

it has achieved rapid growth and alleviated the poverty of many,

but it has also embraced great concentrations of wealth in the

upper echelons of society. Moreover, business membership within

the party has been growing (up from 13.1 per cent in 1993 to 19.8

per cent by 2000). It is, however, hard to tell whether this re

flects

an in

flux of capitalist entrepreneurs or the fact that many party

members have used their privileges to become capitalists by dubi-

ous means. In any case what this signals is the growing integration

of party and business elites in ways that are all too common in the

US. The links between workers and the party organization have,

on the other hand, become strained.

62

 Whether this internal trans-

formation of party structure will consolidate the ascendance of the

same sort of technocratic elite that led the Mexican PRI towards

total neoliberalization remains to be seen. But it cannot be ruled

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