ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 examines how the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese social scientists have approached class and class analysis in the reform era. From a discursive viewpoint, the Chinese Communist Party is right to insist that social classes exist in the People’s Republic of China, as in all class societies, but both the objectivity and subjectivity of the classes in its class maps are questionable, so is the objectivity of its notions of inevitable class antagonism. In fact, discursive fixing is the only way to determine whether structurally determined antagonism exists between exploiting and exploited classes, whether some classes are more ‘progressive’ than others, and whether the exploited classes are bound to acquire the right consciousness required for their liberation from exploitation and oppression by the exploiting classes. Before 1978, the CCP bestowed meaning upon and thus produced social classes as friends and enemies of the Party and as agents and targets of the Chinese Revolution. A major discursive shift began to take place in its class identification after 1956, when objective classification criteria gradually gave way to subjective criteria. Since 1978, the CCP has turned classes into empty signifiers, retaining the class concept for ideological purposes but trying to erase the meaning that was bestowed upon the classes identified before 1978. In this endeavour, they have been supported by a range of Chinese social scientists, who while they may not agree on an appropriate class analysis are united by their opposition to past theory and practice.
