Post-Mao Chinese State

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Post-Mao Chinese State
Some of the most compelling aspects that I have been able to identify in China’s transition from the Mao era to neoliberal post-Mao market reforms include the promotion of foreign investment and entrepreneurship, the de-establishment of agriculture, and the privatization of state-owned industries. The market reforms arose in an unprecedented growth in China’s gross domestic product, which resulted in immense changes in Chinese society, including reducing poverty, increasing average incomes, and widening income inequality levels (Zhang & Ong). The most salient features of these social changes are the emergence of the middle class, the migration of rural workers and farmers into urban cities, and social disparities. Before the neoliberal post-Mao market reforms, China maintained socialist policies that resulted in stagnant economic growth and high poverty levels. However, after introducing a socialist market economy where state-owned enterprises coexist with market capitalism, the country opened up to foreign investment through free-market reforms to speed up its modernization rate.
Other priorities that differed from those pursued during the Cultural Revolution include the de-collectivization of agriculture and the privatization and individualization of various previously state-owned industries. The massive influx of foreign investment and entrepreneurial activity brought about massive social changes, including the emergence of a healthy, sizable middle class as a natural outcome of economic development. At the same time, the market reforms also resulted in extensive rural-urban migration and ghettoization in modern cities. They also led to bureaucracy, new social inequalities, and widening disparities between modernizing cities and the backward countryside (Li). As a result, the per capita annual incomes of families living in urban areas grew while peasant households remained relatively low. Because of this income disparity between urban and rural provinces, many families left their rural communities and moved to the cities searching for higher income resulting in shantytowns.
In today’s post-Mao Chinese state, the government plays a central role in regulating people’s everyday life: the state still maintains centralized control of the economy and the well-being of the citizens. Before the neoliberal post-Mao market reforms, “society was produced by hegemonic socialist ideology and a variety of state-directed social benefits” (Zhang & Ong). However, with the implementation of market reforms and encouraging foreign investment and entrepreneurship, a new form of social control emerged. The government assumed a more distant regulatory stance while promoting self-interested practices. As the government stressed the role of capitalism and self-determination in developing the country, it still maintains its power over the self, especially concerning political freedoms. Even as individuals and communities were cheered to be self-responsible and “take care of themselves through commercial or other privatization activities,” their political and moral freedom was regulated (Zhang & Ong).
The government promises economi...