1: The Great Separation: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Birth of Ordoeconomism

Whether and to what extent contemporary China is neoliberal is an enduring debate. This paper proposes an alternative concept, “ordoeconomism,” to describe China’s hegemonic ideology since Tiananmen. I will advance an explanation of “ordoeconomism’s” political origins in the Cultural Revolution and demonstrate how the similarities and differences between ordoeconomism and neoliberalism account for the entangled history between postsocialist China and global capitalism. “Ordoeconomism” champions a market society that valorizes economic development and material improvement and rejects mass politics as a threat to market order. It is a thoroughly depoliticized ideology, only allowing for a state politics that presumably guarantees economic development and market order. I argue that while neoliberalism and ordoeconomism differ in their prescription of the state-economy relationship, both are a form of the separation of the economic from the political, understood as mass politics. I advance a new interpretation of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and place ordoeconomism and neoliberalism in the genealogy of the great separation of the political and the economic in modernity. I then provide an eventful sociological explanation of the origins of ordoeconomism in the worker uprising during the Cultural Revolution, when Maoists made a fateful separation of the political from the economic, to capitalize on workers’ political energy while neutralizing their economic demands. This strategy succeeded in 1967 Shanghai but failed catastrophically nationwide, leading to disenchantment of mass politics and a simmering popular economism. From the 1970s to 1989, ordoeconomism emerged as an unintended consequence of Maoism and a strange bedfellow of neoliberalism.