| This dissertation examines the relationship between language, gender, postsocialism and neoliberalism in China. By exploring the way neoliberal ideology, state discourse and popular resistance are played out in the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the dissertation provides insights into the complex relationships between language, gender and political economy in a society increasingly dominated by capitalist development while paying lip service to "socialism."; Drawing upon an intensive ethnographic study of state enterprises in Beijing and combining political economy analysis with discourse analysis, this dissertation investigates China's neoliberal restructuring (privatization and marketization) from both the ground level of people's subjective experiences and the top-down statecraft. Unlike easily identified postsocialist moments in the previous Central and Eastern European communist regimes, China's current transformation is a gradual and experimental "reforming" process, and its postsocialist moment is embedded in various programs. My dissertation thus investigates a series of social, welfare, and economic programs (e.g., reemployment, poverty-relief, buyout programs and international joint ventures). Through analyses of these programs, the dissertation historicizes neoliberalism in China and explores new governmental strategies. By restructuring gender and class relationship and by over-emphasizing gender, the state tends to smooth over social crises and downplay class frictions intensified by the economic restructuring. The dissertation also argues that language is used as a new fetish and statecraft to defend neoliberalism and stabilize society, by examining two kinds of post-Mao "linguistic engineering." First, the state recontextualizes established Maoist social and cultural categories (e.g., communist discursive forms) into the post-Mao context in order to construct a "socialist" continuity and advance its neoliberal endeavours. Second, the communist party implements key discourses, e.g., the discourse of "transition" and discourse of " xiaokang society" to legitimize its continued existence and heal fissures and breaches in the fabric of the polity.; In addition to its contribution to four fields of study (language and political economy/neoliberalism, language and gender, gender and neoliberalism as well as the recent discursive/symbolic turn in the field of Chinese studies), the dissertation has implications for sociologists, anthropologists, reformers, policy-makers, and activists interesting in theorizing postsocialist transformation and paradigms for marginalized groups' self-preservation against further economic restructuring. |
