Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China by David Tyfield

Author:David Tyfield [Tyfield, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317565390
Google: hBw0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-05T04:36:27+00:00

Liberty-security driving risk-class in China – security

This emerging system logic is particularly striking in contemporary China, with the unique intensity of (global) system bads there (see Chapter 4) making lived concerns and anxieties about the uneven distribution of these security threats, and the fairness or otherwise of that distribution, amongst the most characteristic aspects of the phenomenology of everyday life. This is seeding a highly dynamic and power/knowledge-system-productive logic, driven specifically by the increasingly individualized twinned pursuit of one’s personal (and familial) ‘liberty’ – the deepening of one’s autonomy and personal opportunity – and ‘security’ – in terms of optimized but never definitively secured shelter from these existentially threatening system bads. It is the combination and restless recursive interplay of these twin forces that drives the emergence of risk-class as a system.

Consider first the security threat aspect. We have considered above the particular intensity of the Four Challenges in China, in co-production with the intensifying clash of the immoveable object (IO) of the CCP Party-state complex power/knowledge system and the unstoppable force (UF) of neoliberal globalization, also conceptualized as CP/KS. And there can be little doubt that contemporary China is indeed a place of intense global risk exposure. Indeed, China is undergoing a unique ‘compressed modernity’ (Chang 2010) unfamiliar in the West, in which the challenges of both industrial ‘first modernity’ and the ‘second’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity, emerging from the former’s success, are encountered at the same time, deepening and complicating both (Han and Shim 2010).

For instance, while the West could ‘pollute first, clean-up later’ – or industrialize first, then de-industrialize and resolve the profound pollution problems of the former stage in ways that supported grappling with the novel problems of de-industrialization, yielding the contested but dominant discourse of the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’ (Stern 2004) – China has had, and will get, no such leeway. The result is not merely to slow down and complicate the ‘cleaning up’ but actually to exacerbate the initial polluting. Hence an exceptionally breakneck industrialization together with environmental pollution of a cost, in economic terms alone, that on some (even official) measures almost entirely negates even the record-breaking economic growth it has notched up (Economy 2007). In short, China’s problems with (global) risks and complexity-system bads are new and ‘we’ in the West have not been there before (cf. Kahn and Zheng 2016: 3), however much both Western and Chinese decision-makers wish to believe it.

Regarding environmental quality, across almost any metric or issue at which one might choose to look, the challenges in China are immense (e.g. Shapiro 2016, Economy 2011, Watts 2010, Kahn and Zheng 2016). Statistics illustrating these problems are now familiar, even in the West. Notoriously, 12 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China (World Bank 2007). In air pollution, only 1 per cent of China’s urban population live in cities with air-quality that would meet EU standards (Kahn and Zheng 2016: 3). Concentrations of noxious gases and carcinogenic micro particulate matter (e.g. PM2.5) in the air

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