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A Semantic Shift from Socialist Land Reform to Neoliberal Pastoral Development in China

This article explores a semantic shift within contemporary neoliberal discourses of pastoral land use and management systems in China. Drawing on historical semantics and interpretive analysis, the article analyzes relevant Chinese state documents to explore the changing meanings of the discursive concept of “free herding” from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China to the contemporary period (1949-2007). As socialist reformers embarked upon the project of collectivization in the Maoist period (1949-1976), developing pastoral animal husbandry was conceived not simply as a technical problem, but a political problem as well. While today the notion of “free herding” has been discussed by contemporary scholars in a technical and negative sense of unplanned, unmanaged, and thus unscientific pastoral grassland use, my analysis shows that earlier ideas of “free herding” meant the positive political consensus and democratic politics associated with the establishment of the new socialist political order and land reform. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that the analysis of language can contribute to our understanding of the discursive nature of China’s neoliberal shift to the market by illuminating the expression and realization of this shift in the new, depoliticized language of “pastoral land use policy.” While scholars have explored China’s engagement with global capitalism and neoliberalism, few have sought to discover the new forms of political economic language and meaning it has made possible. Much of the popular media has celebrated China’s rapid economic growth and development, but market reform has also meant deepening efforts to control, transform, and remake the productive activities of the countryside – a new form of government of population (Greenhaulgh and Winckler 2005). In the contemporary reform period, problems with rural areas – particularly concentrations of poverty in minority nationality areas are associated with their traditional economy and land use (defined as primitive and backwards). The present government advocates –and through policy and projects intervenes in communities based upon a modernization model based on scientific knowledge and technical expertise, and reflects what Timothy Mitchell (2002) calls a modern technopolitics, whereby the art of government (acting upon the action of others) becomes Studies in Language & Capitalism 3/4, 2008: 93 – 109 94 framed in the language of science and technology, modernization, and neoliberal economic development. This paper explores the history of the lexical item “free herding” (Mandarin Chinese, ziyou fangmu, 自由放牧) in the government of ethnic minority pastoral systems in northwest China. Government officials and development scientists use “free herding” as a discursive concept to understand and act upon contemporary ethnic minority pastoralism, particularly to make it profitable and amenable to surplus extraction within the new market economy. The research method for this project is based upon post-structural hermeneutic or interpretive analysis (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983) applied to state documents as well as published documents from contemporary state grassland scientific management institutions to explore the changing meanings of “free herding” from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China to the contemporary period (1949-2007). Through analysis, the paper explores the change in the meaning of the term through time by relating it to changes in China’s political economy. As reformers embarked upon the project of socialist land reform in the Maoist period (19491976), developing pastoral nomadic animal husbandry was conceived not simply as a technical problem, but as a political problem as well. While today the concept of “free herding” is discussed by officials and scientists in a technical and negative sense of unplanned, unmanaged, and thus unscientific pastoral grassland use, during the early socialist period the discursive concept meant the positive political consensus and democratic politics associated with the establishment of the new political order and land reform. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that linguistic analysis can contribute to our understanding of how the neoliberal order is expressed in new, depoliticized meanings given to state land use policy, and ultimately, local pastoral and semi-subsistence land use systems. Theoretical Background In the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Crystal 1997), a semantic shift is defined as the variety of connotations and meanings of a word that are added or removed over history. This temporal and discursive transformation thus refers to the way that words of one historical period can mean different things when compared to the same words spoken or written in a previous one. “Free herding” is precisely an example of a discursive concept that has undergone such a semantic shift.