La condition chinoise

La condition chinoise. La mise au travail capitaliste à l'âge des réformes (1978-2004)
par Jean-Louis Rocca

China is a disconcerting giant. It enjoys the benefits of a flourishing economy, but which supposedly does not meet market standards. Its political system is said to be archaic, corrupt, even ineffectual, yet it ensures a certain degree of order and stability. “Modern” lifestyles are emerging, but “communitarian” rationales continue to dominate the social sphere.
The inability of analysts to understand the connections between apparently contradictory phenomena possibly lies in their obstinate attempt to decipher the Chinese condition in terms of “substances” – the market, democracy, constitutional government, the individual, the law, democratic protest, the middle class, civil society – of which the modern world supposedly realizes the “essence.” The error might reside in their restricting China’s trajectory to one of a “transition” toward a “market democracy,” diminishing the role of politics and history.
On the strength of many years of field research, the author discards the “transitological” approach to examine social practices of the Chinese themselves. What do individuals, institutions and social groups actually do? What do they say about their actions in the context of a “capitalist undertaking” the country has embarked on since Deng Xiao Ping’s reforms? Migrations and unemployment, intensified production, persisting and aggravated poverty, disciplinary systems, social policies: all events that create new situations, without necessarily converging toward a supposedly modern pseudo rationality. Likewise, the modes of protest in answer to the capitalist undertaking transform power relations, as well as the forms of the state, in an often unique fashion, without it being possible to speak of the emergence of a “civil society”.

ISBN : 2845867638