Abstract
The emergent quest for the good life in rapidly transforming China, Laos, and Vietnam can only be understood as part of the political economy of late socialism. This special issue critically engages with the notion of the good life and its ramifications in late-socialist social life through the perspectives of people and communities living amid political economic changes. In this introduction, we weave together the volume's nine empirical contributions by conceptualizing the good life as a field of struggle in which people grapple with the contradictions of late socialism to realize their vision of a good life. We underscore four domains of action in which people articulate and act out their vision: comfort and pleasure, caring and being cared for, cosmology and nature, and freedom and autonomy. Their practices reveal how the paradoxical value frameworks of late socialism impose limits on the possibilities of living well together. Yet, they also indicate the moral agency of people circulating between seemingly incommensurable social orders.
The emergent quest for the good life in late-socialist Asia is deeply implicated in the contradictions and double-sidedness of its political economic transformations over the last several decades. While continuing to be governed by the Communist Party, throughout the 1980s and 1990s Laos, China, and Vietnam replaced their centrally planned economy with a market economy via economic reforms. The ensuing economic growth and global integration have opened up new vistas of aspiration and desire. Wealth, consumption, higher education, global travel, and private housing, once beyond reach for most, have become common pursuits for many. With deepening privatization, market logics increasingly prevail. People are drawn into competitive striving and the accumulation of private wealth to keep up with market demands, even as the socialist ethos of harmony, equality, and mutuality continue to be highlighted in official and popular discourse. Meanwhile, growing social inequality and ecological decline have started to expose the darker sides of the countries’ development, which has relied on natural resource extraction and the devaluation of labor, especially migrant labor. The breathtaking pace of change has generated an imminent perception of moral decline, distrust and anxiety, especially in much-richer China (Ci 2014; Zhang 2020).
These emerging social and political economic issues, however, have dampened neither national leaders’ talk of the “dream” of their countries nor ordinary people's aspirations to a good life. For many, life under late socialism is less concerned with surviving or making ends meet than it was during the pre-reform time of economic stagnation and isolation. Whether they subscribe to their leaders’ dream or not, there is a broad expectation of a better future, despite greater uncertainty and anxiety (Wilcox, Rigg, and Nguyen 2021). This dynamic might be reminiscent of Berlant's (2011) influential notion of cruel optimism, which refers to a situation in which “what people desire is that which prevents them from flourishing.” Berlant portrays the postindustrial social condition in which people persist futilely in a precarious world, as they continue to be attached to the waning liberal-capitalist social order's fantasies of upward social mobility and meritocratic achievements, leading to pain, trauma, and suffering. In late-socialist Asia, in contrast, while the present might be as precarious, it holds out new spaces, desires, and opportunities that would have been unthinkable in the time of central planning and draconian state control, engendering a pervasive sense of abundant possibilities for future making (High 2014; Rofel 2007; Wilcox, Rigg, and Nguyen 2021).
As we shall see in our authors’ contributions, the double-sidedness of late-socialist transformations turns people's quest for the good life into a “field of struggles” (Jackson 2011) that is riddled with trade-offs and conflicting values. Our contributors critically engage with the notion of the good life and its ramifications in late-socialist social life from the perspectives of people and communities living amid the changes and juggling different value frameworks. Underlying socialism is a vision of the good life in which people are freed from alienated labor to fulfill their needs by engaging in socially meaningful work. Although its dream of reconciling human self-interest with collective goals has proven as elusive as the capitalist dream of self-determination and individual freedom (Freud and Strachey (1962) 2010; Marcuse 1964), socialism is an attempt to find the good life. In response to capitalist consumer society's alienation and domination of the individual (Marcuse 1964), socialist citizens are supposed to flourish as part of a collective unified in the work of building a common future. While this vision of the good life may have receded in the market economy, giving way to one guided by individualized goals of private accumulation and self-interest, it continues to influence the ways in which people evaluate their actions. Concurrently, the socialist vision increasingly contradicts the harsh realities of life in precarity for the millions of working men and women whose labor is essential to the foundations of any good life. This contradiction places limits on the pursuit of the good life as a common project of living well together (Arendt 1998), as people's varying abilities to traverse between seemingly incommensurable “social orders” (Gershon 2019) make up a central axis of inequality production.
By addressing the aspiring subject in its social contexts (Appadurai 2013; Robbins 2013), we underscore a politics of aspiration emerging from the realities of people negotiating between multiple value frameworks to create meanings in their lives. This politics of aspiration is rather distinct from the politics of disillusion underlying Berlant's notion of cruel optimism, although the latter is also emerging along with increasing ecological and social constraints on people's lives. Further, the politics of aspiration in late socialism is intimately connected to subtle changes in governance. According to Zhang and Ong (2008), the postreform governing mode of “socialism from afar” is characterized by the realignment of the state and the market to promote consumption and self-entrepreneurism as paths for actualizing the power of the self. Its product is a self-choosing subject governable by the state (see also High 2014; Schwenkel and Leshkowich 2012). Our analyses, however, suggest the emergence of an ethical citizen as the subject of governance (Derks and Nguyen 2020), which reactivates collectivist ideas of social life through the idiom of care. As both a moral discourse and a social value (Nguyen, Zavoretti, and Tronto 2017), care seems well suited to the work of linking personally with collectively oriented actions, both of which are foregrounded by late-socialist citizens.
The term late socialism here is shorthand for the period that started with the three countries’ respective reforms at around the time when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Their populations, economic strength, and global positioning undoubtedly differ. At one end of the spectrum China has a vast, powerful economy, while at the other the Lao economy remains relatively modest, depending largely on investment from China and Vietnam, with Vietnam lying somewhere between the two. What they share is the trajectory of marketization under the continued single-party rule following a long period of central planning and collectivization that we refer to as state socialism. Their shared trajectory has generated comparable and interrelated dynamics of change (see also Hansen, Bekkevold, and Nordhaug 2020). While the term postsocialism is more widely used by international scholarship as an analytical frame, scholars and policymakers within these countries tend to reject the term as an incorrect portrayal that dismisses the endurance of major socialist institutions, preferring to refer to market socialism instead. Taking their insistence on the socialist character of the current governing regimes seriously, we also use the term late socialism, as it suggests less of the rupture experienced by the postsocialist societies of Eastern Europe.
Conceptualizing the Good Life
Sociologists and anthropologists tend to be reticent about making hope, well- being, and the good life topics of inquiry (Bauman in Jacobsen 2014; Ortner 2016; Robbins 2013). Oriented toward uncovering hidden dynamics of alienation, dispossession, and inequality, we commonly produce analyses that take human suffering as a point of departure. This overemphasis on the suffering subject sometimes causes us to lose sight of what Appadurai (2013: 179) terms a capacity to aspire, namely the ways in which humans engage with their own future. The recent turn to “the good,” “well-being,” and “the good life” in anthropology (Fisher 2014; Jackson 2011; Robbins 2013), however, is not only a recognition of ordinary people's future making. It is also a critical response to the omnipresence of performative happiness in advertising and social media, positive psychology's celebration of positive emotions, and the economistic logics of happiness rankings and indexes (Ahmed 2009; Davies 2015; Zhang 2020). Unsettling the idea of the good life as defined by individual choices and preferences, these works reground it in larger value frameworks founded on beliefs about life and death, human dignity and morality, interpersonal relationships, and relationships between humans and nature (Appadurai 2013).
Aspiration, as we recognize, is itself a morally laden concept that cannot be taken as a universal expression of the human experience. The neoliberal aspirational discourse often attributes poverty and suffering to low or lack of aspirations; the expectation that people be aspirational is a familiar logic of restructuring. For example, a common dictum in Vietnam today is that one can never “escape from poverty” without the “consciousness to rise” above one's circumstances (Nguyen 2018a), which in turn aligns with “the will to improve” (Li 2007) of governments and brokers of development as a national modernization project. Growing authoritarianism in late socialism also politicizes aspirations: anyone questioning the nation's dream can easily be cast as unpatriotic, especially in China. They would become what Ahmed (2009) refers to as “affect aliens” in her analysis of immigrants who refuse to assimilate with their new surroundings, feminists who question the family as a happiness-bearing institution, and queer subjects who refuse to be unhappy. Ahmed underscores the exclusionary effect of normalized notions of happiness while questioning it as the ultimate goal of human existence. That said, we shall make the case for reflecting on how people actively infuse dominant visions of the good life with their own meanings by weaving together the very contradictory value frameworks of late socialism. The “dream” propagated by national leaders is thus met by a great diversity of what Li Zhang (afterword, this issue) calls “bottom-up dreams,” simultaneously crafted out of people's historical experiences of war, state intervention in private life, decades of being deemed to be swimming in the backwaters of global modernity, and the sense of national rejuvenation afforded by sustained economic growth.
This special issue considers the aspiring subject as shaping and shaped by the political economy of late socialism. In contrast to the positivist science of measuring happiness as a given condition, ours is an inquiry into how the aspiring subject grapples with the contradictions of their time and place with a view to living well, and the possible outcomes of that struggle. The central question we ask is, What possibilities do people have to shape a life that they consider worth living? Such a question presupposes the active role of the aspiring subject as the agent of both change and continuity. This subject, living out the contradictions and limits of late socialism, also manages to circulate between seemingly incommensurable social orders, rendering the boundaries between them porous and productive (Gershon 2019). Often the capacity to aspire is unevenly distributed; the elite tend to be better positioned institutionally and culturally to navigate the horizons of possibilities and connect concrete wants to larger schemes of distinction (Appadurai 2013). The idea of the good life, according to Jackson (2011), constitutes a field of struggle in which diverse social groups partake with their own strategies and repertoires of meaning from their social positions. The possibilities for living well together thus emerge from the frictions between differing visions of the good life and how people “move objects, forms and ideas across boundaries using consciously calibrated strategies” (Gershon 2019: 405), and in so doing generate new social forms.
We define the good life as conceptions of a life that is considered worth striving for within the horizons of possibilities in a particular time and place. Aspiration to the good life, we argue, is a force of social change as much as it is effected by it. We show that the good life is a site of emergent struggles and politics between citizens and the state, between social classes and genders, which contribute to the paradoxical dynamics of late socialism. It is these social struggles around evolving realities, social orders, and contradictory value frameworks coming alive in people's everyday actions that we seek to capture.
What Really Matters?
Our authors address a broad range of topics. Kirsten W. Endres begins with an account of how electrical home appliances, once curiosities, have become daily necessities for the Vietnamese. Arve Hansen takes us to the foodscape of Hanoi, where diverse dining avenues have emerged alongside the arrival of global food chains and the upgrading of street food for middle-class consumption. Roberta Zavoretti tells of urban Chinese women contesting the imperative of heteronormative marriage through their strategies for ensuring personal autonomy and cultivating social relationships. Sandra Kurfürst shows how Vietnamese female rappers defy gender norms in carving out an autonomous space to make their careers in hip-hop music in a male-dominated industry. Jiazhi Fengjiang's analysis of grassroots philanthropy (caogen gongyi) in China shows how charitable and volunteering activities offer opportunities for working people to gain the sense of public engagement that is central to their definition of a good life. Charlotte Bruckermann addresses ambivalent aspirations to a green life in the encounter between urban volunteers and rural people involved in afforestation projects sponsored by the Chinese state and large corporations. Elizabeth M. Elliott portrays how the Laos concept of well-being, sabai, which locates a person in their social and spiritual worlds, shapes rural people's health care–seeking practices. Fan Zhang introduces us to the lifeworld of Tibetan opera performers, whose performances underscore a vision of the good life that incorporates the logics of the state and the market into local ideas about cosmological balance. Michael Kleinod-Freudenberg and Sypha Chanthavong's figure of the bangbot, a forest spirit endowed with morality, embodies a criticism of how commercially motivated deforestation is foreclosing ecology-based visions of the good life, while at the same time inducing nostalgia for it.
What do these seemingly disparate topics have to do with the good life? Following Arendt (1998), who views the good life through the prism of actions aimed at living well together, we underscore how people articulate their ideas of the good life through everyday actions which, we argue, are shaped by the social expectations deriving from existing value frameworks. The broad range of our authors’ analyses can be defined as four intertwining domains of action: comfort and pleasure, caring and being cared for, cosmology and nature, and autonomy and freedom. These domains of action constitute the material and social spaces where social groups articulate their aspirations, act out what they consider worth striving for, and evaluate their lives. How people act in these domains and what drives their actions not only indicate circulation and movement among multiple social orders (Ghershon 2019). They also defy the commonly assumed boundaries between individual and collective, self-interest and reciprocity, and public and private, indicating the ambivalence and multivocality of the aspiring subject.
Comfort and Pleasure
It is hard for people born since the end of central planning to imagine a life without electricity, the internet, or motorized transport, or one in which food is rationed and a black-and-white television may be a well-off family's most valuable asset. In Endres's account of “living electrically,” the arrival of the electric fan in colonial Vietnam was nothing short of a miracle—nowadays even air-conditioning is commonplace. Hansen's analysis describes, in contrast to the severe food shortage a couple of decades ago, a bustling foodscape in which the Hanoian middle classes avail themselves of endless dining choices. They can command both the authenticity of street food and the exclusiveness of upmarket restaurants, or summon their favorite food with a few touches on their smartphones. Most people in China, and to a lesser degree in Laos, would relate well to similar accounts of major material changes in their daily life.
State socialism frowned upon comfort and pleasure as bourgeois weaknesses; pleasure-seeking was marked out as morally problematic and anti-revolutionary. In the centrally planned economies that downplayed consumption due to imminent shortages, compounded by the aftermath of war and serious natural disasters in Vietnam and Laos, comfort and pleasure were also out of the reach of ordinary people. The market economy has not only made comfort and pleasure conceivable but has also turned them into respectable pursuits, backed by party-states keen to keep the middle class growing and yet politically inactive. Exclusive spaces of consumption such as gated housing and international travel are made increasingly available to the middle class, who, according to some authors, “born of high GDP and nurtured by a culture of consumption,” trade purchasing power and consumption choices for political self-awareness (Ci 2014; Dai and Rofel 2018: 44; Nguyen-Vo 2008). Whatever political energy there is in the middle classes, it seems to be channeled into protecting their own interests against the bureaucratic failure of state and market actors to ensure the security of their private interests and properties (Dai and Rofel 2018; Zhang 2010). Endres's informants adamantly complain about not being able to use their appliances due to a power cut, prompting her to ask how people had coped without them previously. The same can be asked about the internet, air-conditioning, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, refrigerators, electric stoves, and personal computers, the use of which requires proper living spaces and a constant supply of electricity, which used to be rationed for lighting only. Such morphing of wants into needs can be similarly observed in food consumption. As with travel, dining out has become a field of practices in which the ability to authenticate one's experiences and to embrace global trends is a means of social distinction (Hansen, this issue). Desire for comfort and pleasure has been normalized under marketization, and consumption has turned into a citizen's quasi-duty (Nguyen-Vo 2008; Osburg 2013). It is equally pursued by working people, whose higher income allows them to acquire certain aspects of middle-class life, and whose expectations are raised by the middle-class projection of such consumption (Nguyen 2015, 2018b; Otis 2012).
One might see in these the rise of Herbert Marcuse's (1964) one-dimensional man, the tamed subject of techno-capitalism who finds its soul and identity in consumer objects and lifestyle, bereft of any capacity for critical reflection and transformative action. Yet late-socialist subjects’ desire for comfort and pleasure, we argue, is connected to broader aspirations to modernity, progress, and development in contexts where people had long felt that they were lagging behind in the global world (Derks and Nguyen 2020; Harms 2016). Endres suggests that electrical appliances carry major implications for gendered notions of the good life that are inseparable from the meaning of electricity as liberating society from labor, darkness, and backwardness. Take the electric stove, for instance; apart from being a labor- and timesaving device, it helps to remove the dirt common to older methods of cooking on coal and wood. The removal of dirt is essential to a shiny and presentable middle-class kitchen aligned with the notion of the modern middle-class woman, who is able to manage her home scientifically with the right technology and knowledge (Nguyen 2015). Similarly, the ability to traverse global and local dining spaces, to own vehicles and technological devices, to travel internationally for leisure or work (Kürfurst, this issue) signify conscious engagement with the global world and assertion of one's place, and by extension one's country's place, within it (see also Rofel 2007). As much as it concerns individual wants, therefore, the desire for comfort and pleasure is also a yearning to belong to a larger whole, and can be a space for transformative action. With it, the aspiring subject seeks to overcome past experiences of isolation, dependency, and poverty, and to achieve recognition as one who is in tandem with the vanguards of global modernity. The much-derided rise of conspicuous consumption by the few in such rapidly transforming locations does not need to equate with the broader-based quest for improved living standards by the many who are still without access to the comfort of goods and services easily available to those—not least academics—critiquing it (Miller 2001).
Caring and Being Cared For
Broadly defined, care constitutes “processes of creating, sustaining and reproducing bodies, selves and social relationships” (Nguyen, Zavoretti, and Tronto 2017: 202). Care encompasses what we do to sustain our world in order to live well (Tronto 1993). More than just the needs of the sick and the infirm, it also refers to the complex relationships between social groups, citizens and states, humans and their environment. Late-socialist Asia experiences a common shift in the care relation between citizens and states: government programs such as health insurance and old-age pension are reexpanding, seeming to contradict the privatization and restructuring mentioned. Contributory health insurance is now almost universal in China, and covers a large majority of the population in Laos and Vietnam. It appears that the socialist state is once again picking up on its promises of universal care after years of leaving it to the market. However, the expansion of these new welfare programs makes it even more imperative for individuals and families to rely on their own resources and networks for access to care and social protection (Nguyen and Chen 2017; Lin and Nguyen 2021). The reemphasis on familialism is coupled with pervasive messages from state and market institutions about people's responsibility to care for the disadvantaged and the environment. Socialist ethos of mutuality and solidarity are actively deployed to mobilize individual contributions to social and environmental care (Nguyen 2018b; Palmer and Winiger 2019). These shifts have major implications for the realities and practices of caring and being cared for.
Elliott's analysis shows how rural people in Laos negotiate between the care provided by traditional healers, who are more attentive to patients’ personal needs, and public hospitals, which appear inattentive and cold. The difference is linked to state incentive structures that neither recognize traditional healers nor incentivize attentive care among public medical professionals, leaving it to people to address their own needs. Zavoretti's account of unmarried women in urban China, often referred to as “leftover women” (shengnu), highlights the predominance of heteronormative marriage through which property ownership, reproductive labor, and care are regulated in official conceptions of the good life. This helps to enhance familialism for the sake of late-socialist welfare restructuring. Concurrently, as Fengjiang and Bruckermann show, even people struggling with their own livelihoods are drawn into the work of improving the lives of the more disadvantaged Other or protecting the environment sponsored by state and market institutions such as the online commerce giant Alibaba. Care, it seems, functions as a moral discourse that smooths out the increased burdens, social conflicts, and inequalities induced by economic and welfare restructuring (Nguyen, Zavoretti, and Tronto 2017).
Meanwhile, caring and being cared for are also central to how people seek meaning, mutual support, and social validation in their lives. Even as they delay marriage and having children for the sake of personal autonomy, Kürfurst's Vietnamese female hip-hop artists emphasize caring for their parents and husbands as an important aspect of their lives. In the same vein, the unmarried urban Chinese women discussed by Zavorretti challenge the imperative of marriage by invoking the importance of care for their own families and for themselves. Amid the turn to private responsibility, their moral commitment to care can be a matter of survival for their parents in old age, as it is for the mother of one of Zavoretti's (2017) informants, who survives only due to her daughter's support. The stronger familial basis of social protection in more competitive social environments also translates into increased personal and financial investment in children's all-around development and their academic suitability for higher education, especially in China (Kipnis 2011; Kuan 2013).
These dynamics of caring and being cared for reverberate beyond family and kinship. Elliott's village healers in Laos not only provide physical treatment but also care for their patients’ souls by seeking to recreate the harmony between the body and external forces. Such care demands time and effort and is poorly remunerated, yet they derive strong motivation from the social prestige thus gained. Actively caring for disadvantaged others as part of the broader schema of “doing good” is also a source of meanings for Fengjiang's informants, working men struggling with their livelihoods in Wenzhou. Being a “greenwood hero” (lulin haohan)—a righteous outlaw acting on behalf of the weak—yet also seeking state recognition has implications for what it means to be a working man in China today, where prestige and desirability are reserved for men with wealth and power. Likewise, caring for the environment, whether by planting a virtual tree from their office desk or flying to rural frontiers to plant trees physically, helps Bruckermann's urban middle-class volunteers to encounter the alienation of urban life and work, even though some might only do it in response to workplace pressure. In the face of rampant natural resource extraction in Laos, Kleinod-Freudenberg and Chanthavong note a similar form of environmentalism with which the urban middle class and intellectual elite express disenchantment at the ecological decline and call for the return of past moral behavior. When taking part in the work of sustaining bodies and relationships and protecting the environment, therefore, people tend to ground their actions in the ambivalent and multilayered logics of care. As argued below, these logics are closely intertwined with ecological traditions and practices in the region.
Cosmology and Nature
Late-socialist societies are confronted by ecological decline that has led to both growing environmental conflicts and increased yearning to reconnect with nature. As people become more anxious about ecological problems, late-socialist governments have stepped up their “environmental rule” (McElwee 2016). The Chinese government, for example, has been championing a state-led form of environmentalism called ecological civilization (Bruckermann, this issue), with which the state seeks to monopolize knowledge production and interventions in environmental issues. The emphasis on improving people's environmental consciousness across these contexts often diverts attention from the disproportionate environmental burdens and costs incurred by certain populations (Bruckermann, this issue). However, grassroots environmentalism does not always align with the state's environmental rule. Sometimes environmentally motivated popular protests spill out into regime critique; for example, protests following the fish kill due to a chemical spillage from a Formosa factory off the central coast of Vietnam in 2016 developed into demand for government transparency. More importantly, people across the region experience deep-rooted concerns about cosmology and nature; cosmological traditions premised on human situatedness in the natural and supernatural worlds have long existed. Despite centuries of encounters with modernist assumptions of human supremacy over nature, not least through state socialism's destructive industrialization schemes, they continue to shape local ideas about being and living in the world.
According to Elliott, sabai, the Laotian sense of well-being, is only possible when people act as part of a cycle of care with other humans and the spirit world. Thus health can only be sustained by maintaining both the boundedness of the body and its harmony with the surrounding environment, including the spirit world. Kleinod-Freudenberg and Chanthavong tell us more about this form of transcendental reciprocity through the imaginary of the bangbot—a forest spirit representing a “moral superhuman” that provides a potential role model for human behavior. Linking morality with the undisturbed forest, the bangbot carries a critique of the moral degradation resulting from the ecological decline caused by capitalist extraction. Similarly, Fan Zhang's Tibetan opera performers act out a notion of the good life defined by the work of accumulating virtuous merits and respecting the land and nature for the sake of their karma. Similar to sabai and bangbot, Zhang shows, karma beliefs and practices do not rule out local people's occupation with material possessions, state care, and pleasure and comfort. Yet local people incorporate these worldly elements into their enduring logics of cosmological balance rather than giving up on the latter for the allure of the modern material world.
Our authors also show that these ecologically based notions of the good life provide people with the resources to articulate critiques of the commercialization of nature and the impacts of national development on local ecologies (Kleinod-Freudenberg and Chanthavong, this issue). The insistence on the mutual constitution of the human body and its ecological sphere implied in the embrace of sabai (Elliott, this issue) brings into question forms of well-being that deny the reciprocity between human and nature (see also Fan Zhang, this issue). Even as Bruckermann's urban eco-volunteers may be the subjects of state environmentalism when planting a virtual tree or participating in a workplace-organized volunteering excursion, their encounters with rural people allow for reflection on the work that the latter do for the common good. The nostalgic evocation of ecological imaginaries such as bangbot (Kleinod-Freudenberg and Chanthavong, this issue) thus might be underscored by genuine yearning for a “green life” (Bruckermann, this issue) and reconnection with nature prompted by the alienation of urban life. The renewed turn to religion-inspired ideas can be fraught with power manipulation and complexity (Esler 2020), and the recentering of concepts and imageries such as karma, sabai, or bangbot may be just a reaction to the fast pace of change. Yet unlike in the postindustrial West, where they are selectively adopted as optimizing techniques for the sake of capitalist productivity (Marcuse 1964), these concepts are internal to local worldviews. They have proven resilient in the face of successive attempts by those in power to deride them throughout various historical eras. Instead of simply being “digested by the status quo as part of a healthy diet” (Marcuse 1964: 16), they do hold potentials for driving people to action and providing them with counterarguments against pro-growth development, competitive striving, and even state power.
Freedom and Autonomy
The breathtaking pace of change and the emergence of contradictory value frameworks have resulted in a widespread perception of moral crisis in late-socialist Asia, as highlighted by Jiwei Ci's (2014) analysis of China, echoed by similar perceptions in Vietnam and Laos. If a crisis of the good is common in most societies, as he posits, postreform China has been undergoing a crisis of justice and order with daily violations of “elementary norms of co-existence” becoming normalized (Ci 2014). It is the result of a vicious circle in which certain people gain unfair advantages from the violations without being corrected, leading even those with no objections to the norms to emulate their transgressions. Ci traces this situation to a double-layered breakdown in the political authority and exemplarity of the party-state through widespread corruption and rent seeking. In a society where moral education through exemplarity is central to social life, credible moral exemplars for a notion of the good based on collective goals seem in short supply as people forgo them for private wealth and pleasure. Consequently inequality and anxiety rise, at times prompting nostalgia for the relative equality and apparent absence of corruption under state socialism. However, as nobody wishes to relive the privations of life under Mao, the nostalgia merely reflects the alienation and vacuity of what Ci (2014: 36) terms “wealth-chasing and pleasure-seeking subjects.” The only way out for him is to cultivate “agency through freedom,” namely people's capacity to embrace meaningful and responsible action without coercion (5). Ci, however, is hardly upbeat about this in a society where “a leader-centered morality has lost its foundation and yet an alternative, superego-centered morality is not there to take its place” (214).
Yet as argued earlier, the pursuit of pleasure and wealth does not necessarily rule out moral agency and yearning for transformative action. In fact, people are continually on the lookout for spaces in which to articulate critiques of power. Kurfürst's female Vietnamese hip-hop dancers and Zavoretti's unmarried urban women defy the male dominance of the music industry and the state-sponsored, market-promoted hegemony of heterosexual marriage by carving out autonomous spaces for their private and professional lives. What appear as personal efforts irrelevant to public life are indeed actions that gradually undermine the hegemony of heterosexual marriage, and thus its state-sponsored patriarchal foundations. Despite their struggles with the pressures of the modern workplace and the difficult realities of making a living, Fengjiang's and Bruckermann's volunteers find their space for transformation in the work of relieving suffering and caring for the environment. Central to people's yearning for a pure past, as expressed by the bangbot (Kleinod-Freudenberg and Chanthavong, this issue), a reconnection to nature, seen in the eco-volunteering movement in China (Bruckermann, this issue), the Laos concept of sabai (Elliott, this issue), or the emphasis on accumulating merit in the Tibetan concept of karma (Fan Zhang, this issue) are indeed moral critiques from reflexive, meaning-seeking actors. As we discuss below, the coexistence of authoritarian government, neoliberal governmentality, and the modality of private accumulation simply renders their actions more complex and ambivalent than the portrayal of a morally vacuous citizen.
The Politics of Aspiration in Late-Socialist Asia
Ceaselessly projected by market institutions, the idea of the good life as a private state of satisfaction to be achieved by pursuing self-interest, making the right market choices, and applying appropriate methods of self-improvement has taken hold. It is an idea in which the postreform state is complicit for good reason: it helps to sustain state rule by marking out the limits of individual aspirations (High 2014; Nguyen-Vo 2008; Zhang and Ong 2008). However, people's ideas about how to live well have never been defined solely by the state. Even during the height of state socialism, they continued to draw from enduring institutions and communities of meaning such as family, kinship, and the home place. The socialist vision of the good life, meanwhile, continues to provide social and political resources for critiques of market-induced social problems; its emphasis on collective values has become part of what count as traditional repertoires of meaning. Adding to this picture is the tension between cosmopolitan desires arising out of transnational encounters, and the nationalist sentiment of citizens living in a globalized world in which people are more connected and yet immersed in shifting hierarchies of power (Boute and Pholsena 2017; Dai and Rofel 2018; Hoang 2015; Rofel 2007). All these movements and crosscurrents between different social orders give rise to contradictory values that people draw from in crafting their aspirations, engendering politics that are particular to late socialism.
The Ethical Citizen of Late Socialism
While Ci's (2014) analysis offers a good overview of the late-socialist moral landscape, it does not capture the moral life of the person unfolding at the interstices between multiple value frameworks and transcending the dualism between the good and the right. Instead of the “reflective freedom” (Laidlaw 2013) that Ci seems to be talking about, we underscore the Arendtian notion of freedom based on action. According to Arendt (1998), it is in embarking on actions that defy conventional and political givens that people come together to form new beginnings that gradually undermine existing structures. It is a form of freedom that people have to wrestle from the confines of their social position in everyday actions. We argue that it is in the very work of incrementally building this space for freedom through action that many, particularly weaker groups, find meaning in their lives (Fengjiang, this issue; Kürfurst, this issue; Zavorreti, this issue; see also Hsu and Madsen 2019). In doing so, they turn to moral ideas that are often marginalized in national and global projects of modernity. Concepts such as karma and sabai or the bangbot imaginaries thereby emerge from the margins to enter into dialogue with the logics of growth and accumulation, at times providing the very moral resources that society needs.
However, this on-the-ground struggle for spaces of action is complicated by the production of a moral subject akin to Muehlebach's (2012) ethical citizen, the self-responsible and compassionate subjecthood that is necessary for restructuring and privatization. Devoted to nurturing families and bodies (Elliott, this issue; Kürfurst, this issue; Zavoretti, this issue), the ethical citizen of late socialism is also supposed to possess an ecological consciousness (Bruckermann, this issue), the benevolent heart of a greenwood hero (Fengjiang, this issue) or the generous soul of a village healer shouldering the health care needs of their community (Elliott, this issue). Above all, this ethical citizen is shaped by the moral discourse of caring coconstituted by state, market, and other social institutions. Caring for the disadvantaged or the environment through donations, charity, and volunteering provides the moral distinction needed by anyone wishing for validation of their success. As people come to grapple with the alienating and ecologically eroding forces of development, the “choosing subject,” governable by the state (Zhang and Ong 2008) seems to have receded, allowing this ethical citizen to come to the fore. Zhang and Ong's (2008) “socialism from afar” has morphed into a mode of governmentality through caring that features an intimate relationship among market rationalities, the socialist ethos, and enduring ideas of moral life. It explains the simultaneous reactivation of socialist exemplarity and values and the rolling out of privatization and restructuring in the last decade (Nguyen 2018b; Palmer and Winiger 2019; Schwenkel and Leshkowich 2012). This very conjuncture between contradicting value frameworks unleashes complex politics and struggles, not just between social groups and regions but also in the very actions of the same individual, group, or community.
Politics and Possibilities
The contradictions of late-socialist political economy become apparent in the moral quandaries behind people's actions. The motivated social engagement of Fengjiang's greenwood heroes is damped by its competition for time and energy. Unlike wealthy philanthropists, they experience a visible tension between providing for their family and caring for disadvantaged others in society. Aspiring to a cosmological balance whose material progress is enabled by the very natural resource extraction that disturbs it, people's concern with cosmology and nature (Bruckermann, this issue; Kleinod-Freudenberg and Chanthavong, this issue; Fan Zhang, this issue) is also contradicted by their own consumption, be it of travel, food, or leading “electrical lives” (Endres, this issue; Hansen, this issue). The energy-intensive life promoted by the state and the market depletes resources and further damages the environment (Endres, this issue). Even as Zavoretti's unmarried urban women or Kürfurst's female rappers in Hanoi articulate their actions in terms of self-determination or critiques of commodification, their logics tend to gravitate toward market rationalities of flexibility, self-responsibility, and self-enterprise. Concurrently, their actions are underscored by a longing for state recognition, a desire also observed by Elliott among the village healers who wish for political support even as their work falls outside the bounds of state governance. A certain cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2005; Wilcox 2021) is observable between late-socialist states and their citizens, which at once nurtures the aspiring subject and sets its boundaries.
The limits of the aspiring subject are also drawn by the consolidation of class and gender politics of late socialism. Many people are bound by the need to labor to earn a living, which constrains their capacity and time for performing public-oriented actions. Conversely, the good life, in whatever form, depends on the labor and sacrifices of these very people. The energy-intensive life that Endres describes relies on the steady supply of electricity made possible by countless rural people being uprooted or losing their livelihoods to the installation of hydropower dams across the region (Dao 2011). A green life, as imagined by Bruckermann's urban white-collar eco-volunteers, would not be possible without the labor of the rural people who plant the trees and keep them growing. Their participation in reforestation clearly differs: for the former it is an opportunity for self-improvement, for the latter a matter of survival. Similarly, the life blessed with abundant food possibilities (Hansen, this issue) would be unthinkable without the toil of the farmers and the multitude of rural migrants who provide cheap labor for the urban food industry (Nguyen and Wei 2023). In countries where domestic servitude was condemned until recently, numerous rural women have been leaving their villages to care for urban middle-class homes in China and Vietnam (Nguyen 2015; Sun 2009), providing the urban middle class with the comfort and pleasure of a smoothly run domestic life. In short, the good life is only possible because certain people are there to shoulder its costs or the dirty, messy, and strenuous activities required to sustain it. In late-socialist Asia, these people are consistently rural people and migrant laborers. Meanwhile, both at home and in the labor market, women continue to be the main providers of care and domestic labor for the sake of reproducing healthy bodies and livable homes (Nguyen 2015; Sun 2009). While urban women may challenge the imperative of marriage and domesticity (Kürfurst, this issue; Zavoretti, this issue), they are the ones picking up the arising care needs of their own families.
The development model that devalues migrant labor for the sake of industrialization and urbanization has given rise to a laboring class whose social and political standing is fundamentally different from that of the socialist working class (Lin 2019; Nguyen and Locke 2014). However, this very laboring class is equally under the spell of the aspiring subject. For example, Bruckermann's tree-planting peasants dream about the consumption enjoyed by the urban volunteers they encounter, and Fengjiang's cabdrivers strive to serve the greater good in order to achieve a publicly recognized career such as those available to people with ample resources. With the expanding service economy, people of the laboring class find themselves in intimate encounters with the wealth projection and class distinction practices of the people they serve, with implications for their own aspirations (Hoang 2015; Nguyen 2015; Otis 2012; Sun 2009). Working people tend to view the precarity and exploitation they experience as trade-offs and sacrifices necessary for a better future, if not for themselves, then for their children (Wilcox, Rigg, and Nguyen 2021). Yet this belief in future making only holds to the extent that state-promoted dreams correspond with the possibility of realizing their own dreams, however long this may take. After all, people are only ready to make sacrifices for state-led national development goals as long as they see themselves living in countries that deliver the good life and enable them to be part of the modern world (Dai and Rofel 2018; Harms 2016).
Conclusion
The aspiring late-socialist subject's imagination is captured by an encounter between the “utopian dreams of socialism and the fictional expectations of capitalism” (Wilcox, Rigg, and Nguyen 2021: 12; see also Beckert 2016) whose goals are inherently contradictory. While each of these goals has brought about specific forms of disenchantment and unfreedom (Berlant 2011; Ahmed 2009; Marcuse 1964), their coming together under late socialism has generated a plurality of ideas and practices that emerge from people's very struggles with contradictory value frameworks. These struggles give rise to particular politics of aspiration between gendered social groups, people and the state, and the local and the global.
The most notable of these is the disconnection between the socialist ideal of the good life premised on liberating the working class, and the latter's reality of laboring in precarity and exploitation for the sake of others’ pursuit of the good life. This disconnection is disguised through the production of the ethical citizen via the combination of socialist ethos, market rationalities, and past exemplars. Even as citizens pursue private accumulation and satisfaction, they are called on to care for themselves, others, communities, and the environment, and at times to make sacrifices in support of national goals. People, especially working people, do respond to these imperatives because they resonate with the emphasis on mutuality and solidarity that remains a staple of social memory, despite the foregrounding of private responsibility.
The shaping of the late-socialist ethical citizen via state and market institutions does not foreclose the possibility of freedom through action in the Arendtian sense. People's actions, however, must be understood in their everyday circulation between different social orders and strategic underscoring of certain value frameworks “at different moments and for different purposes” (Gershon 2019: 413). Our authors’ analyses show that people tend to see caring for the self and others as their space for transformative action in ways that defy the separation between care as a moral discourse and care as a social value (Nguyen, Zavoretti, and Tronto 2017; see also Hsu and Madsen 2019). As Zhang (2020) suggests in Anxious China, even as many Chinese seek out the individualized interventions of psychotherapy to improve their private well-being, they do so to be able to care better for their families and social relations. The recentering of hitherto marginal concepts and imaginaries such as karma, sabai, or bangbot in everyday actions indicates a political reckoning with the dark sides of development and material progress. It has the potential to reactivate ecologically based conceptions of the good life. Under late socialism, where party-state and market powers are intimately connected, spaces of freedom are by no means readily given, however; they have to be constantly fought for and at times sacrificed for, and it is often in these very struggles and sacrifices that people see possibilities for generating meanings that are central to their definition of the good life.
This special issue is the outcome of a conference under the same title at the Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) in September 2019. Funding for the conference was made available through a research project funded by the European Research Council's starting grant (WelfareStruggles, no. 803614) and a conference grant from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research . We would like to thank the conference participants and discussants for their stimulating inputs, particularly by Susanne Brandstädter, Ian Baird, Kirsten W. Endres, Hy Van Luong, Andrew Kipnis, and Jonathan Rigg. We also thank Arve Hansen, Michael Kleinod-Freudenberg, Sandra Kürfurst, and Roberta Zavoretti for their comments on the introduction, and Zhenwei Wang for her research assistance.
