ABSTRACT
The topic of this book is China’s economic culture. This term is ambiguous. We can either read it as ‘the culture of China’s economy’ or as ‘China’s culture is economic’. This ambiguity tells us something very essential about culture and economy: We cannot unequivocally separate the two concepts in the sense of referring them to two distinct social domains. As I will demonstrate in this theoretical chapter, this is not unique to the case of China, but applies for cultural analysis in economics generally. Yet, in the Chinese case this insight has a distinct slant. As we will see, in many respects specific aspects of Chinese culture such as particular values and beliefs indeed relate to economic activity implicitly or explicitly, such that we can say that China’s culture is ‘economic’. Just think of the ubiquity of the ‘God of Wealth’ in popular religion, which is a far cry from religious attitudes that distance themselves from the pursuit of profit. This observation goes back to the fact that Chinese society in Late Imperial times was a market society in structural and institutional terms, and that these traditional patterns have seen a revival in the recent period of ‘reforms and opening up’, which is reflected in the cultural framework. It also means that this cultural framework is essential in determining the nature of the Chinese economic system past and present. Thus, this book makes the special claim of a peculiar ‘fit’ between economy and culture in China. Chapter 2 will lay the historical foundations for this claim. I argue that this relationship between economy and culture is constituted via the role of the state in mediating this relationship. This relates the ongoing process of ‘economic reforms’ (i.e. the transition to the market economy) to the secular process of building a modern state in China, which started in the second half of the nineteenth century as a response to the challenge of Western imperialist nation states. In this process, the linkage between the past and present is constituted by what Foucault calls a particular form of ‘governmentality’ in his analysis of the evolution of the state and structures of power in Western European
history. With this term, Foucault encapsulates the fact that systems of ruling large societies encompass much more than legal institutions or mechanisms of enforcement of power, but include, for instance, hegemonial structures of knowledge or, in particular, internalized systems of disciplining the self. Therefore, in his view, modern market economies based on liberal doctrines are part and parcel of modern states and their systems of governing large-scale complex societies.1 In China studies, this idea has been very influential in recent attempts to grasp the paradoxical ‘neoliberal’ nature of emerging Chinese capitalism combined with a socialist state. Indeed, what appears as a paradox to many Western observers, namely the combination of authoritarian one-party rule with rampant capitalist practices, may be understood as a specific form of governmentality: the market is part and parcel of the system of rule in China. Thus, understanding the longue durée of evolving Chinese governmentality can start out from considering the role of markets in Chinese society and culture, past and present.2 In this book I will develop the idea that this linkage may be best understood in using the analytical lens of a particular term that played a central role in the traditional form of governmentality in the Chinese Empire, namely ‘ritual’. This term, I claim, encapsulates a particular form of governmentality that manifests many family resemblances with forms of governing and governance in contemporary China which centre on the relationship between state, market and society. However, on the theoretical level I also pursue the idea that all economic activity is cultural. This differs fundamentally from the current approach to culture in economics. After a long time of neglect, in the past three decades of research culture has been rediscovered by economists. However, in this research the explicit assumption is made that the two domains of culture and economy are separable, which is methodologically reflected in the standard econometric approaches which treat certain cultural data as exogenous parameters. This exogeneity also follows from the general idea that ‘culture’ refers to a legacy of the past, which by definition cannot be changed by activities taking place in the present. In these approaches, culture often become devoid of any specific content, because it is defined only in terms of past identities of certain culturally demarcated populations. This means, for example, that economists show that third-generation immigrants still manifest differences in values and beliefs in the present compared to other groups, which is then explained in terms of a peculiar cultural heritage.3
