Urban Salon, December 3, 2010

Professionalism, volunteerism, and neoliberalism: questions of subjectivity and governmentality in urban China

Lisa Hoffman, Urban Studies

University of Washington Tacoma

In recent years, centralized planning in China has been roundly critiqued, resulting in the devolution of urban planning, the marketization of labor relations, and the adoption of new mechanisms for generating economic growth and providing public welfare. In the process, new practices and spaces of subject formation have emerged, specifying particular kinds of citizens. Based on research in Dalian, a major port city in northeast China, this paper considers two increasingly commonplace subject forms and what their emergence underscores about contemporary governmentalities. First I will discuss the urban professional, an ever more familiar identity that appeared with the end of state-directed job assignments for college graduates and an official aim to develop the nation’s human capital. In the paper, I also comment on the individual volunteer who donates time, energy and resources to help solve social problems in the city.

The paper argues that the emergence of professionalism and volunteerism do not represent the “end” of state governance per se, but rather the emergence of new forms of governing in the city. In particular, the paper argues that through the analysis of professionalism, we may identify a “late-socialist neoliberalism” that weds neoliberal techniques of governing with Maoist era politics of building the nation through labor, producing what I have termed “patriotic professionalism” (Hoffman 2006, 2010) The discussion of volunteerism also underscores the complex genealogies of such practices, including socialist traditions of “serving the people,” capitalist practices of “donating” time and assets through philanthropic acts, and neoliberal practices of shifting responsibilities to individuals and other community groups. This analysis of professionalism and volunteerism thus also affords us the opportunity to ask how we may make sense of neoliberalism in contemporary modes of governing the city.

Thus, I am interested in considering what it means to talk about neoliberalism in China. As an anthropologist I encountered this issue through a focus on new subject forms. In many studies you will hear about “neoliberal subjects” emerging at particular times and with particular kinds of reforms in the way governing occurs. More specifically, many critiques of neoconservative political programs have been said to be ushering in an era of “neoliberal subjectivity.” I hesitate to have “neoliberal” modify subject, however, for it assumes so much about the relationship between political programs and subjectivity, and it tends to reify much more fluid social forms. In addition, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the different components that are a part of governmental regimes and rationalities – such as practices, techniques, norms, politics, ethics and modes of self care – and how they come together in different ways at different moments. It was this analytical stance that has forced me to consider how practices from disparate, and seemingly contradictory, political traditions might converge. This in turn ultimately led me to the argument in my book about the unexpected wedding of neoliberal techniques of governing with socialist political norms and traditions in patriotic professionalism, and it has led me to a new set of questions about volunteerism and charitable giving as modes of solving social problems in the city. This view of neoliberalism is not simply about adding an “s” to neoliberalism, for the term often is used to describe a singular and hegemonic political project that is governed by markets and class interests; rather, I am asking us to consider a different conceptualization of neoliberalism that allows for the possibility of not knowing the political and ethical outcomes in advance.

In this presentation I begin with a brief description of the professional subject and then I explain how my approach – informed by Foucault’s work – has led me to a particular study of neoliberalism. I am especially interested in understanding how mechanisms of governing that reference the liberal tradition and contain rationalities that are similar to other advanced liberal regimes are in fact combined with non-liberal practices, norms, and politics. A consequence of my approach also converges with a growing literature on the “uses of neoliberalism,” as James Ferguson (2009) has recently put it. This is a stance that does not assume we know the political or social forms that emerge simply because the market mechanism is involved or because we identify a reference to liberalism. To be clear, I am not trying to depoliticize that which should be critiqued as producing inequality or marginalization, but I also believe these are research questions rather than theoretical stories to tell or polemical arguments to make. Empowerment, justice, belonging – this is exactly what is at stake.

A story about a young professional

As an anthropologist, I would like to begin with a story about a man, Mr. Song, who had been an active Red Guard leader during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He met his wife as a Red Guard, she also was a leader, and as he tells his tale, had devoted his life to building the socialist nation. Mr. Song was trying to explain to me what the difference was between his generation and his children’s generation. He worked hard to understand what they wanted and how they went about things, but found it very difficult. As he elaborated his ideas over dinner one evening, his daughter sat quietly at the table. It was only later that she confided that they often fought over these issues and that he was using my presence to send a message to her.

One thing Mr. Song said was that his daughter’s generation “liked a lot more adventure and risk” and that they had “less sense of responsibility to the government for training them.” Here he was referring specifically to his experience of state-sponsorship for college training, meaning college was free for students, but that they were obligated to work for the state after graduation. Not only that, but when Mr. Song graduated from school he entered his workplace through the direct state job assignment system. In this system, universities reported the numbers of graduates and fields of study to the province. The provincial level authorities reported this information to the central level, and national level planning groups took the numbers and requests from work units to make assignment decisions. Plans were then sent back down to the local level for implementation by the universities and local governments. It was effective in placing needed personnel in far away places and along with the dossier (dangan) and household registration system (hukou) enabled the government to use geographic distribution as a form of social control and even punishment. A key governmental objective of the system was full employment, and education’s purpose was to fulfill central production plans.

Under this system, labor was not a resource to be developed individually, but rather was part of the state-owned means of production and socialist welfare package of the work unit (see Bian 1994, Davis 1990). The returns on one’s labor power were not for individual accumulation, but “were realized only in the state’s production…not on the individuals” (Cheng 1998: 23). Job assignments, in other words, were expressions of national duty and socialist nation building; work for Mr. Song was not about self-focused development, in contrast to his daughter’s cohort. He had been taught that, as Liu Shaoqi said “It is the worthiest and most just thing in the world to sacrifice oneself for the Party, for the proletariat, for the emancipation of the nation and of all mankind, for social progress and for the highest interests of the overwhelming majority of the people” (cited in Bray 2005: 60, emphasis added). By the mid-1990s, however, there was a decided shift away from the allocation of “undifferentiated labor” and self-sacrifice as an expression of care for the nation.

Certainly there had been many reforms in the assignment system, such as tuition-based admissions in place of state-sponsorship; the phasing out of job assignments and the related requirement for graduates to find positions on their own; the end of the employment guarantee for graduates and the reality of possible unemployment; and the market-based distribution of graduates into state and non-state sectors of the urban economy (e.g., private, foreign, etc). Nevertheless, Mr. Song, who grew up in this era of state-directed job assignments, virtually no job mobility, and the sense that it was his duty to the nation to take his assignment had trouble understanding how his 24 year old daughter could go through five positions in one year, finally settling on one with a foreign company. He struggled to accept his daughter’s individual decisions and what seemed like their self-focused nature with little care for the companies she left. Song Yan, however, understood this as her right to self-development and career opportunities. She did stay with the foreign freight forwarding company for a number of years, but moved on after she married. She started her own business (several times) and supported her husband who quite successfully went from the seafood to the financial industry. Song Yan experienced dramatic change in her life in last 15 years, and has had a trajectory and transition from college to work that is very different from her parents’. “The generation gap between my parents and me,” Mr. Song said, “is like a gradual line going upward, but between our children and us, it is like a sharp step up to another plane.”

I offer this story as a way of saying that a new professional subjectivity has emerged in post-Mao China, narrated by young people in terms of self-development (ziwo fazhan), individual career planning, as well as responsibilities, albeit responsibility understood not in terms of sacrifice for the Party and nation. Song Yan exemplifies this self-enterprising urbanite who made individual decisions about where to work and where to live, assessed the pros and cons of each move (calculative ethic), and pursued opportunities that afforded her development, growth and training, and also that allowed her to fulfill other responsibilities in her life. Following such personal dreams was the “main difference between generations” from the point of view of another college graduate I met whose parents had shied away from a move to Shanghai several years prior because of the “risks” involved. In contrast, she was eager to move to a new city and to see what she could accomplish. “I am not afraid of failure,” she said, “I may have failure in Shanghai, but I am ready to face my possible failures. I don’t know what I will confront.”

The emergence of self-enterprising professionals also is related to post-Mao projects of investing in the nation’s “human capital” to support economic growth and competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. These investments are apparent in national campaigns to “raise the quality [suzhi] of the people” and in directives to increase the overall education training in China by dramatically expanding college enrollments. Educational reforms and one-child policy campaigns both relied on discourses of suzhi and ideas about how to help the nation prosper. In contrast to Mao’s claim that national strength would be found in revolutionary fervor and an abundance of people, post-Mao cultural critiques located the potential for reaching modernity in the population’s quality, not its quantity, bringing “the self” into the domain of “Development” in new ways (Anagnost 1997: 119, Yan 2003: 511, Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005, Greenhalgh 2008). In the late 1990s China also officially pushed for an increase in the number of college graduates in the nation. Statistics from Dalian reflect national trends. In 1996 there were 12 institutions of higher education and 53,000 students enrolled in universities. By 2003, however, there were 18 institutions of higher education in the city and 150,000 enrolled students. College graduates also learned that as “talent” (rencai) they were now considered necessary inputs in development projects; having an education and what is termed a high “cultural level” (wenhua shuiping) were no longer liabilities as during the Cultural Revolution. Academic degrees, training and experience, and specialized professional skills were all newly valued “assets” of an individual and critical “inputs” into the production process. In contrast, during Mr. Song’s time, the ideologically committed (“red”) jack-of-all-trades was considered central to national progress, not intellectuals or professional experts.

The self-enterprising professional subject thus emerged in relation to a host of reforms and policies, including the decentralization of decision-making, the marketization of labor and welfare, the responsibilization of individuals and communities, and modes of self-care that prioritized self-enterprise, self-improvement, and self-actualization. My position is that the adoption of these technologies of governing and self-care suggest interesting connections with what is typically termed neoliberalism. In a moment I will explain this in more detail, but here I want to underscore that at the same time I identify neoliberal elements in China, we must recognize that other norms and politics are at play (e.g., norms of cultural competence, gendered understandings of rencai, the legacy of the state redistributive economy, responsibility to the national collectivity). This is especially important when considering “practices of responsibility,” contemporary modalities that draw on disparate understandings of responsibility (zeren) to various scalar social collectivities in China (e.g., family, lineage, relations [guanxi], nation).