Dwelling narrowness: Chinese media and their disingenuous neoliberal logic

This article uses a Chinese television drama Dwelling Narrowness to illustrate the inherent tensions and pitfalls of Chinese neoliberal developmentalism. It examines its production, circulation and popular consumption in order to illuminate the interplay of the Chinese state, capital and popular aspirations in the restructuring of Chinese media and communication industries. In such interplay, neoliberal strategies are enwrapped in socialist legacies, traditional values, post-socialist dilemmas, and prosumer desires. Neoliberal techniques and practices, which are sometimes sincerely and sometimes disingenuously applied in the Chinese case, create a hybrid political-economic structure that is non-liberal, anti-liberal and neoliberal, all in one. To affix a'post-' to neoliberalism would both overestimate the neoliberal logic and underestimate its continued agency in China's transformations.