Performing Neoliberal citizenship: the entrepreneur figure in postsocialist China

In contemporary post-socialist China, a new figure has been advanced as a new model for the new era – the entrepreneur. This presentation examines this figure as is it found in an internet-based series of interviews titled Words of a Journey (2011), directed by the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke for the whiskey manufacturer Johnny Walker. This series is part of a much larger marketing campaign designed to “speak to China’s aspirational consumers,” and is based on market research that indicated “A man was judged a success not by where he was, but where he was going…” (Brook, 2008). In Words of a Journey, the interviewees narrate stories of success through adversity, stressing the importance of tradition, independence, hard work, perseverance, and self-improvement. Using theories on entrepreneurship, self-development, and governmentality, I examine their narrations of success and their representation as heroic and daring entrepreneurs who “made it” in the Reform Era. I argue that the entrepreneurs are being advanced as inspirational – and moralistic – models of success, and their platitudes about self-determination emphasize success through hard work and sacrifice, declarations that confirm the morality of their actions, and also connect to a past history of moral discourses surrounding the Chinese class figures. I analyze the ideology behind self-improvement, and how the entrepreneur narratives not only convey individual success stories, but are part of larger discourses, such as the concept of suzhi or “quality,” the contemporary period’s “self cultivation” being promoted in China’s post-socialist period. I argue that the inspirational entrepreneurial figure is promoted in the series through the use of entrepreneurial narratives (“e-tales”) and the neoliberal discourse surrounding concepts of “self help,” and that these figures allude to and reflect the past Socialist class models while evoking a neoliberal moralistic discourse for the Reform era that valorizes the entrepreneur figure and China’s market economy