postsocialism: ideals , ideologies and practices in Eurasia （2）

Rethinking Chinese Consumption : social palliatives and the rhetorics of transition in post socialist China  (Kevin Latham  pp217-237)

1) how is China postsocialist
Since reforms... the government withdrew state subsidies from many areas of social and economic life, scaled back welfare entitlements, removed centralized distribution systems and allowed 'free' markets to spring up all over the country.

The 'post' of 'postsocialism' in the chinese context does not signify a straightforward 'after' in either logical and chronological terms . Rather, it incorporates and is based upon many of the same principles and assumptions of its supposed antecedents. Contemporary China has to be understood not only in terms of the radical economic changes and social transformations that have taken place over the last two decades of reform, but also in terms of what has not changed.
2) consumption as a social palliative
3) power and legitimacy in Post-Mao China
p223    I argue that change has been fundamental in supporting the CCP's legitimacy, this is not because all the changes are positively received by the Chinese populace. Nor is it because consumption provides a materialistic palliative for social disorientation. Rather, it is because the hegemony of the Party works discursively through a number of 'rhetorics of transition,' which require the notion of a rapidly changing and developing society.
4) Rhetorics of transition
Transition works to  maintain a hegemony where by any discontent with the present is downplayed in order not to endanger the imagined future.
The reform period has seen China increasingly divided and differentiated as a society and without Mao's promised utopia the Party has difficulty unifying the Chinese populace... China's post socialism hinges upon these divisions and the contradictions and disjunctures that accompany them.