Polanyi Meets Luxemburg in China: Rethinking Xiaohong Xu’s “Great Separation” Thesis through the Lens of Chinese Workers (1974-1989)

Yueran Zhang, University of Chicago

One of the most significant contributions made by Xiaohong Xu to our understanding of the historical link between China’s Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao Reform era is the “great separation” thesis, inspired by his creative re-reading of Karl Polanyi. This thesis posits that Maoist leaders’ multiplex maneuvering in the early phase of the Cultural Revolution separated the economic realm from the political realm. This “great separation”, according to Xu, “resulted in the unintended consequence of the disenchantment of mass politics and the rise of popular economism, which eventually led to the emergence of ordoeconomism through the post-Tiananmen era”. This paper concurs with Xu that China’s turn to neoliberalism indeed entails the institutional separation of the economic from the political, but questions Xu’s assumption regarding the extent to which the Maoist elite maneuvering in the early Cultural Revolution successfully managed to condition popular subjectivities henceforth. Tracing multiple waves of labor mobilization from the late Cultural Revolution to the pro-democracy movements of 1989, this paper shows that Chinese society – particularly grassroots workers – did not quietly acquiesce to the top-down imposition of the “great separation”. Instead, workers’ activism repeatedly challenged the separation of the economic from the political in powerful ways. In the end, the very conditions of existence of China’s socialist working class had to be brutally liquidated for the Party leadership to impose the “great separation” on society. These historical dynamics are consistent with Rosa Luxemburg’s observation that subaltern class struggles have an inherent tendency to overstep the boundary between the economic and the political. Therefore, this boundary could be solidified only by a series of forceful political interventions that decidedly quash such class struggles. This critical engagement with Xu’s argument also helps us rethink the relationship between cultural and political explanations in the historical analyses of political economy.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 64. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: Historicizing the Cultural Revolution and the Reform