The inevitable self-demise: why neoliberalism fades from our sights ---------- lessons from China's history of neoliberal adaptation

• Main Author: Ying, Chuyan
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Economic development; Social sciences::Sociology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/166506
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This essay explores the self-destruction of neoliberalism as a political and economic narrative and its four-step process, illustrated through the analysis of the Chinese history of neoliberal adaptation. By utilizing narrative analysis and historical lens, the essay argues that the narrative contestation between a liberal political-economic paradigm vis-à-vis a non-liberal one is constantly self-repeating and that neoliberalism, as a narrative, is self-contradictory and in the long term, inevitably provokes and creates its own narrative competitor, which ultimately undermines and destructs neoliberalism. This process consists of four steps, respectively, they are neoliberal capturing, neoliberal habituation, neoliberal unaccustomedness, and neoliberal counter-narrative emergence. To test the validity of my argument, I have incorporated these four-step analyses into the Chinese context, in which the neoliberal narrative has experienced the whole process from being valued to self-destruction. After reviewing the full process of neoliberal self-destruction in China, the author concludes that China’s economic turn from pro-liberal to anti-liberal is not contingent on leadership change, but is a natural and inevitable process of neoliberal self-destruction.