China's great transformation: neoliberalization as establishing a market society

David Harvey (2005), in ‘A Brief History of Neoliberalism’, includes China as a country embarking on the course of neoliberalism. But he points out that the historic moments of neoliberalization initiated by Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are purely coincidental. He emphasises that China is a ‘strange case’ as the outcome has been a particular kind of neoliberalism interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control’ (Harvey, 2006 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development, Verso, London (2006). Harvey, 2006, p. 34–41). The presence of the ‘authoritarian centralized control’ seems to mean that China has deviated from the neoliberalism model. Ong (2007, p. 4) rightly detects such a tension between Chinese reality and neoliberal ideology, arguing that ‘Harvey has trouble fitting China into his “neoliberal template”’… ‘China is deviant because neoliberal policies are combined with state authoritarianism’. She proposes to understand neoliberalism as a technology of governing ‘free subjects’. Implicitly, authoritarian control may well be part of such governance technology..