Old Wine in New Bottles: Discourse Articulation and China’s Ideological Adaptation in the Time of Transition

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes the ideological adaptation that occurred in China during the 1990s, when the reform of state-owned enterprises rearticulated the state-labor relationship. The market-oriented reform produced a series of meaning dislocations within the discursive field, departing from the traditional ideology of the party-state. By conducting discourse analysis on media reports published in the People’s Daily, this article argues that the party-state deployed various discourse articulation practices to realize its ideological adaptation and maintain internal ideological consistency. Specifically, the party-state employed four types of ‘interpretive packages’ to reconcile the market reform’s rationale with its own orthodox ideology, rearticulating the quadrilateral relationship among the workers, state enterprises, the party, and the government, as well as their roles within this ideological tradition. Discourse articulation has contributed greatly to the construction of a hegemony that constrains and fixes the new meanings stemming from the reform. However, it has also generated unintended consequences, such as conflicts among various discourse practices. The findings provide us with a pathway to understand how authoritarian states stabilize their ideology during periods of accelerated change and allow us to rethink the role of ideology in states’ transformation, a topic that could be explored in future studies.