Introduction. Post-Mao, Post-Bourdieu: Class Culture in Contemporary China

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald,Yi Zheng

doi:10.5130/portal.v6i2.1390

Abstract

This special issue of Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies explores the relationship between taste, choice and social stratification in contemporary China. It is premised on the observation that the past thirty years of accelerated Reform policies have initiated a system of authoritarian capitalism, which fosters a network of social values, focussed on opportunity and struggle figured through financial achievement and consumption, and given affective meaning through nationalism. Not all Chinese enjoy the full gamut of these experiences, although most partake in struggle in some form. Opportunity arises mainly from the cultural capital, financial and social position of one’s parents, and, to some degree, from innate talent and hard work, an urban upbringing, and national provisions for educational advantage. Pre-existing forms of influence and power—local networks, Party membership, sufficient funds for education—are the strongest determinants of sustained success. In some cases, the opportunity for wealth creation has allowed some social mobility for entrepreneurial minds, whilst also re-establishing privilege amongst those whose status was already high through long term political or intellectual activity.

Highlights

Post-Mao, Post-Bourdieu: Class Culture in Contemporary ChinaStephanie Hemelryk Donald, RMIT University, Yi Zheng, University of Sydney.This special issue of Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies explores the relationship between taste, choice and social stratification in contemporary China
The actual economics of status are not the main focus of this special issue, they are crucial to the conditions through which a newly forming idea of class, if not class itself, is managed and performed
The rise of nationalism and the central policy of harmonisation allow this deferral to continue, with the social energies of the people being deflected into larger scales of rhetorical belonging

Summary

Introduction

Post-Mao, Post-Bourdieu the Reform period and the factors that have contributed to it. In the section ‘New Perspectives Reports,’ our two authors engage directly with cultural debates in PRC on class taste, the media and social change Their cultural commentaries reflect on post-reform social restratification and the resurgence of class culture. Lin concurs with some of the leading Chinese cultural critics that we are witnessing the emergence of a taste elite, comprising the new generation of highly educated youth, who seek to benefit from post-Reform economy and polity. In all these papers, the use of the term middle class is strategic rather than absolute, insofar as the term already refers to an empty categorisation, and a shifting set of practices, habits and aspirations. The use of the term is helpful in that, it does not indicate a class structure or class habits familiar to other societies (or not necessarily), it aptly captures both the deployment and elision of class consciousness in China post-Mao