![]() He writes to demonstrate the superiority of a liberal order to win the decisive “battle of ideas” (507). Mises’s goal is to defend liberalism against a socialist onslaught by debunking Marxism. ![]() “Marxists” are for Mises “all who have accepted the basic principles-that class conditions thought, that Socialism is inevitable, and that research into the being and working of the socialist community is unscientific” (16 emphasis added). Mises’s Neoliberalism as Liberal Negation of Marxism and Socialism In this essay, I trace the historical origins of this Chinese policy defiance from neoliberalism by analyzing differences between neoliberal policy prescripts and the Chinese reform agenda. China’s economic policy is not congruent with neoliberal economics, and China’s rise has contributed critically to what Ilene Grabel (2017) has conceptualized as “productive incoherence” undermining the global hegemony of the neoliberal policy paradigm. In fact, some go so far as to claim that China has established an alternative development model to the Washington Consensus (Horesh and Lim 2017), a Beijing Consensus (Huang and Cui 2005 Ramo 2004). China has not pursued the core policies of full-fledged price, trade, and financial liberalization and privatization (see, e.g., Liew 2005 Lo 2009 (D. 2 China has not implemented the quintessentially neoliberal policies of the Washington Consensus and unlike Russia escaped shock therapy (Weber 2020). Yet China is under constant attack for disobeying the rules of the game of neoliberal globalization. The reform era’s emphasis on economic growth also has reintegrated China into the arguably neoliberal global regime of capital accumulation, and with this integration, class divide and income inequality have been growing rapidly (see, e.g., Harvey 2007 Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2005 Schmalz and Ebenau 2012). A broad range of studies on a wide range of empirical phenomena find China to be neoliberal in this sense. From a related perspective, China’s developmentalism, economism, and transitionism represent a “linguistic hegemony” of neoliberalism (Hui Wang 2003). Consequently, a technocratic policy agenda became dominant, and China became amenable to what Foucauldians call neoliberal governmentality (see, e.g., Sigley 2007 Zhang and Ong 2008 (L. ![]() The reformers replaced the Maoist slogan of revolutionizing social relations with the idea of making up lessons from capitalism in order to achieve historical progress through market reforms. As I show, this shift resulted in the primacy of economic efficiency and growth and the rejection of late Maoism’s emphasis on permanent revolution. China is found to be (non-)neoliberal on several grounds that can be traced back to the shift from Maoism to economic developmentalism in the late 1970s. Let me spell out how my historical argument in this paper helps us to make sense of the contradictory state of the literature on China’s being neoliberal or not.
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