Symbolic Capital, Existential Insecurity, and Industrial Policies: a Neo-Bourdieusian
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Symbolic Capital, Existential Insecurity, and Industrial Policies: A Neo-Bourdieusian Theory of the Leninist State in China (1927-1982) Yuting Chen Advisor: Prof. George Steinmetz Second Reader: Prof. Andrei S. Markovits A THESIS Submitted to The University of Michigan Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Honor Bachelor of Arts March 2021 1 Dedication This study is dedicated to my mentors: Prof. George Steinmetz, Prof. Andrei S. Markovits, Prof. Krisztina Fehervary, and Prof. Qixuan Huang. Thank you for the guidance, strength, and skills. 2 Contents List of Abbreviations 3 Acknowledgments 4 Abstract 7 Introduction 9 Chapter 1. The Games of Old Bolsheviks 20 Chapter 2. Existential Insecurity as the Producer of the Militarized Socialist State 38 Chapter 3.The Becoming of the Third Front: Macro-Structural Change, Reformulated Socialist Statecraft, and the Militarized Logic of Big Push Industrialization 69 Chapter 4. The Beginning of State Capital Differentiation: Power Struggles, Subfield Autonomy, and Delegation of Political Will 97 Conclusion: State Strategies and Zeitgeist 148 Bibliography 155 3 List of Abbreviations Intercontinental ballistic missiles – ICBM The Central Military Commission – CMC [中央军事委员会] The Chief Directorate of Automobile Industry – CDAI (It was a subordinate unit of the First Ministry of Machine Building till 1982) [汽车总局] The Chinese Communist Party – CCP [中国共产党] The Chinese State Automobile Corporation – CSAC (The successor agency of the Chief Directorate of Automobile Industry since 1982) [中国汽车工业总公司] The Chinese State Shipbuilding Corporation – CSSC (The successor agency of the Sixth Ministry of Machine Building) [中国船舶工业总公司] The First Ministry of Machine Building – FMMB (it was the umbrella agency of civilian manufacturing) [第一机械工业部] The Ministry of Oil Industry – MOI [石油工业部] The Ministry of Railways – MOR [铁道部] The Sixth Ministry of Machine Building – The Ministry of Shipbuilding Industry (for the sake of simplicity: MSI) [第六机械工业部] The People’s Liberation Army – PLA (it is the name of the armed forces) [中国人民解放军] The People’s Republic of China – PRC [中华人民共和国] The Railway Corps – RC [铁道兵] The State Capital Construction Commission – SCCC [国家基本建设委员会] The State Economic Commission – SEC [国家经济委员会] The State Planning Commission – SPC [国家计划委员会] 4 Acknowledgments Raised as a Marxist in a family of retired military officers, party apparatchiks, and red engineers, I have tried in writing this thesis to come to terms with my upbringings. Intellectually, I rebelled. Today, I contend that the actually existing socialist project is a tragic failure directly responsible for many of the horrifying nightmares my grandparents witnessed. But the passion I still feel for emancipation—for the dream of a classless society of total transparency and equality in which “a better, warmer, more meaningful life” (Halfin 2000, xi) can be pursued—remains with me. It is in this sense that I am interested in the rise and fall of the socialist project. I remain loyal to the tradition of the socialist intelligentsia in yet another way: “I sought—and still seek—to engage not an abstract reader who would speak through this or that virtual device but an intellectual circle I will into being, a group of concrete individuals who respond to me, agreeing or objecting but never remaining indifferent” (Halfin 2000, xi). I was fortunate to be accepted by such people. My original debt is to my friends in Shanghai. Without them I would not be where I am now. Many of them have shared their friendship and intellectual curiosity over the years. Many of them have helped me obtain materials and reflected on the meanings of everyday life in and after state socialism. I am grateful in particular to Jiang Li, Zhenqian Huang, Hongye Yan, Jiayi Yan, Yiyang Xu, Minqi Wang and Yue Yao for their valor, intelligence, camaraderie, and creative experimentations with Bolshevik ideals; and especially to my institutional boss Yu Peng—the master of the absurd, whose everyday aesthetics and dark sense of humor refined my views of the socialist bureaucracy. Special thanks to Chenyang Li: he helped me to polish the initial ideas. I am continually grateful to Professor Qixuan Huang at Shanghai Jiao Tong University: he 5 introduced me to the study of comparative political economy. It is in this sense that even the most individual research, viewed in terms of the social and intellectual support necessary to its accomplishment, can be defined as a social enterprise. In the process of revising this thesis, I become especially conscious of the magnitude of personal help provided by the faculties of the University of Michigan. I would like to thank my professors: Marry Gallagher, Xiaohong Xu, and Pauline Jones. They helped me find my footing as I started this process. Many thanks to Professor Krisztina Fehervary for introducing me to the anthropological approaches to state socialism. She has helped me reflect on the meanings of the socialist past as well. I owe particular gratitude to Professor Andrei S. Markovits, who took me by hand from my very early days at Ann Arbor. In addition, I also want to thank Professor Markovits for his critical comments on the manuscript. Last, and most important, special thanks to my advisor, Professor George Steinmetz, for his countless helpful comments, inspirational introduction to critical theory, and for detecting hiding conundrums in the manuscript. Many other scholars provided their support at different stages of the project. I am also indebted to several Michigan graduate students: many thanks to Michael Thompson-Brusstar and Sara Morell for their critical comments on the research proposal. I am also very grateful to Wen Xie (from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago) for her critical comments on the manuscript. She also encouraged me to apply for doctoral programs. Professors at the Annual Workshop of Comparative and International Political Economy at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2019) have exposed me to intellectual ideas that have 6 deepened my understanding of the politics of economic development in post-1978 China. I am particularly grateful for their comments and suggestions. The University of Michigan Political Science Department generously provided funding for this project. The Gerstein Funds for Honor Students allowed me to obtain books and archival materials that are essential to the argument of this thesis. Most importantly, I also want to thank my family for their love and bottomless reserves of support throughout the process. 7 Abstract What led the post-1978 Chinese Leninist elites to allocate state-owned economic capital in radically different ways, ranging from centrally planned import-substitution to market- building efforts to attract foreign investment? In the railway sector, the Ministry of Railways maintained its authority to operate the entire industry till 2013; in the shipbuilding sector, the minister of shipbuilding industry pursued a program of vertical integration for export- oriented industrialization since 1978; and in the automobile sector, the central government moved from designing coherent industrial upgrading policies at national level to the control of foreign direct investment for domestic market-building in 1986. This thesis discloses a neo-Bourdieusian state theory to explain this empirical puzzle by establishing existential insecurity (both as structurally induced material forces—the collective efforts to deal with credible threats backed by capabilities to perform symbolic and physical violence and subjective experiences of state actors—the fear of enemy) as a cause of variations in state strategy of industrialization. The divided socialist elites competed inside the meta-field of party-state—the Central Committee of the Party for a specific form of symbolic capital: the statecraft of socialist modernization. This involved exhibiting an alleged expertise for articulating the most effective strategy of industrialization, and a capacity to balance national defense and improvement of living standards. Moreover, military merits—the abilities to prepare, fight, and win battles—formed in revolutionary warfare was central to socialist statecraft which resulted in a military logic of industrialization in the geopolitical space of the global Cold War. Between 1964 and 1978, this military logic of practice critically affected the developmental trajectories of these three industrial sectors which then gave rise to state capital differentiation in the post-1978 reform. Competitions among the divided socialist 8 elites decisively shaped the ongoing production of industrial policy. Policy formation was also influenced by geopolitical changes, responses by the firm managers, and the dominant actor’s final authority in appointing and dismissing policymakers. The effects of these additional mechanisms were typically mediated by the two general mechanisms: (1) (dis)alignment of policy preferences between constituents in the central committee members and (2) the subfield bureaucrats’ articulation of industrial policies to the constituents. 9 Introduction The state is the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural capital or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such constitute the state as the holder of a sort of metal-capital granting power over other species of capital