Lost in Transition: Categorical Articulation and the Socialist Catalyst of China’s Market Turn

Yige Dong, University at Buffalo

Rather than treating China’s post-socialist transition as a sudden rupture, recent scholarship increasingly emphasizes factors such as elite infighting, local initiatives, and historical contingency in such processes. Within these new accounts, some socialist experiments under Mao have been reconsidered not as obstacles to the reform but as preconditions that enabled it. Focusing on the curious case of “service companies” (fuwu gongsi) within China’s state-owned enterprises in the 1980s, this paper argues that infrastructures built under Mao were not merely preconditions but actually catalysts for the market turn. However, these preexisting infrastructures were not directly rendered compatible with reform institutions. Instead, I argue, it was through a process I call “categorical articulation” that these socialist categories were reformulated within the Party-state’s theoretical repertoire and became legible to emerging market-oriented policies. As I show, at the initial stage of the reform, politicians and technocrats paid great effort in re-articulating certain socialist categories in order to “save” socialism. However, paradoxically, their endeavors in the end cleared the path for the theoretical legitimation of market reform in the end.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 184. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (III): Braving the Market Waves