Great question—and a rich one. Applying Ian Parker’s concept of discursive complex to 《興盛與危機──論中國封建社會的超穩定結構》 (Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, 1984/1992) allows us to explore how this foundational work in Chinese intellectual history constructs a certain mode of subjectivity and affective relation to history, embedded within both Marxist discourse and modernizing anxieties.
1. What is the text doing discursively?
Jin and Liu’s thesis proposes that traditional Chinese society exhibits a “super-stable structure”—a system that reproduces itself with exceptional resilience despite internal contradictions. This structure is defined by:
• Bureaucratic centralization
• Ideological continuity (especially Confucianism)
• Lack of transformative social revolutions from below
This is a discourse about Chinese history that attempts to explain why modernization failed, and why China entered its 20th-century crisis. It draws on Marxist historical materialism, systems theory, and comparative historical sociology.
2. How is this a discursive complex?
Following Parker, we identify the text as a discursive complex because it is:
(a) Discursively constructed:
It creates a mode of talking about Chinese history that is systematic, scientific, and teleological. It borrows legitimacy from both Western theory (e.g., Parsons, Marx) and Chinese historical scholarship, producing a rationalist, “objective” meta-narrative.
(b) Affectively invested:
Readers (especially post-Cultural Revolution intellectuals) are not just reading history; they are experiencing a psychic resolution—why their own subjectivity has been fractured, why China has suffered cycles of repression and chaos. The “super-stable structure” becomes an object of fascination and frustration, simultaneously feared and admired.
In Parker’s terms, this is where the libidinal economy enters. The text offers a structure that:
• Explains the pain of modern Chinese intellectuals
• Justifies a break from tradition
• Positions the subject as someone who understands the structure and thus escapes it
(c) Ideologically charged:
While seemingly neutral, this discourse implicitly reaffirms a modernizing and rationalist ideology, rooted in Enlightenment and Marxist paradigms. It carries the ideological function of:
• Delegitimizing premodern forms of life
• Reinforcing the elite role of the intellectual as diagnostician and savior
• Aligning China’s trajectory with a global (Western) timeline of progress
3. Subjectivity Organized by the Discursive Complex
This discourse organizes a particular kind of subject:
• The traumatized but awakened intellectual who sees through historical illusions
• The anxious modernizer, aware of the weight of the past
• The historical diagnostician, positioned outside the ideological cycles he diagnoses
This subject is split in Lacanian terms:
• Fascinated by the stability of the Chinese past (symbolic order)
• Alienated from it (modern subjectivity cannot return)
• Haunted by the failure to become “modern” (constitutive lack)
4. Ideology and Power
The super-stable structure theory may appear critical, but it reinforces a liberal technocratic elite position. It consolidates:
• Authority of the knowing intellectual
• Delegitimization of mass movements (e.g. peasant rebellions are seen as system-stabilizing, not revolutionary)
• Fear of populist disruptions (an echo of post-Cultural Revolution trauma)
Thus, the discursive complex helps maintain a conservative-modernizing ideology, while appearing progressive.
Summary
《興盛與危機》 as a discursive complex:
• A discourse that rationalizes and historicizes China’s stagnation
• An affectively charged narrative that provides identity and explanation to post-Mao intellectuals
• An ideological mechanism that reproduces elite knowledge-power structures
• A psychic structure that organizes ambivalence, anxiety, and desire about tradition and modernity
Let me know if you’d like to contrast this with another discursive complex (e.g., May Fourth discourse, or Xi Jinping’s revival of Confucianism), or if you want this formulated in more psychoanalytic language.
