Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

life.”²⁴ This, in turn, has entailed a change in social values, whereby pursuing personal happiness and sex brought on a search for individual identity. However, instead of engendering an uncontrollable relaxation of customs, this trend has led young generations toward a new awareness of their inner self—now reconstructed as an “enterprising self,” one that is more calculating, proactive, and disciplined. Ever since the 1980s, this has increasingly reflected in literature and the arts. It is precisely in this sense that the replacement of the previously dominant socialist notion of class consciousness with post-socialist personal desires must be understood.²⁵ The rediscovery and reappropriation of Confucianism has been the spontaneous response to the extremes of such changes, as it fulfils the cultural, religious, and ethical needs of the population.²⁶ It goes without saying that many of these phenomena have been allowed so far as they do not challenge the party-state’s monopoly of power and information.

Over the last few decades, as Yan Yunxiang noticed, this pseudo-liberalization has been guided by the strict control of political authorities:

the invisible hand of the market obviously plays a decisive role in promoting mobility because it requires free and mobile labourers. The visible hand of the Chinese party-state, however, is equally important because it has a high stake in stimulating economic growth and maintaining the social order on its own terms. In the end, it was the combined power of the market and the party-state that shaped the patterns of mobility and disembedment of Chinese individuals.”²⁷

One may expect increasing awareness of consumer rights, worker conditions, and environment recovery.²⁸ The fact that the Chinese party-state has never accepted political liberalism—and that, accordingly, we cannot seriously talk of effective liberalism or neoliberalism in today’s China—does not per se refute the argument that the phenomenon of individualism in China still challenges established categories of thought.²⁹

To sum up, from an ideological perspective, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mark a regression of individualistic theories to the benefit