From Dualistic Opposition to Dyadic Integration: Toward a New Political Economy of Chinese Practice

• Published in: Modern China 2022-05, Vol.48 (3), p.459-497
• Main Author: Huang, Philip C. C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dyads; Economic systems; Hegemony; Market economies; Medicine; Modernization; Physics; Planned economy; Political economy; Private enterprise; Socialism; Worldview
• ISSN: 0097-7004; 1552-6836
• DOI: 10.1177/00977004221082515

This article argues for the construction of a new political economy based on Chinese practices. It begins with an explanation of the research approach of starting from practice, and from a distinctive mode of thinking that is akin to that of medicine, rather than Newtonian physics and mathematical logic. Then it discusses the present-day Chinese practices of combining socialism with market economy, state enterprises with private enterprises, the peasant economy with an industrial economy, and the party-state with the economy—all distinctive realities about the new Chinese political-economic system. The foil for the discussion is the long-standing hegemonic ideology and worldview of Anglo-American classical and neoclassical liberal economics and law. This article suggests that we employ China’s traditional dyadic integration worldview, evident in today’s practices, to arrive at a new integrative cosmological view that rises above both. To a considerable extent, this article is also a reinterpretation of classical Marxist political economy. What the article advocates may be termed a “participatory socialist market economy,” to be distinguished from a bureaucratized and controlling socialist planned economy. This is a system that is still very much in the process of formation, its particular content and characteristics yet to be clarified and specified through a sustained period of searching through practice.