The “Knowledge Economy” and the Global Bio-political Race: The Case of China.

When Foucault (1980; 2003) started to work on bio-power - which might be summarized as the maximization of state/national resources, including human resources -- he was clearly linking the state to the rounding out of the population as a whole. The focus on the intimate linkage of sovereign power and bio-power was made even more important since 9/11, when the exercise of sovereign power is used to justify the protection of population at home.The importance of state sovereign power in China is certainly unquestioned, even amidst economic reform. What is new in the governmental reasoning in China is that the full development of the individual now constitutes the source of the strength of the state, and that the full development of the individual involves, among other things, self-steering of the individual. The rationality behind this shifting is that the state realizes the knowledge economy is about competing globally for talents. This might be interpreted in terms of Foucault’s security (sécurité), “the future-oriented management of risk” (Valverde 2007, 172). "Knowledge economy", as a new concept, started to circulate in newspapers, magazines, media and Chinese leaders' speeches in 1998 since it first appeared in the 15th Communist Party Congress report. According to the rationalities of the state, the individual has to improve his/her physical, mental, psychological quality to prepare for and act as integral part of the new knowledge economy. This is fully in line with an emerging global elite consensus that is also evident in popularizers here in the West. Thomas Friedman's latest book The World is Flat (2005), popularizes the stakes in what he describes as a race to the top, one in which human capital/resources are identified as the deciding factor. Although Friedman does not say this, it is thus a global biopolitical race. Friedman pointedly identifies China, together with India and Brazil, as three most important players in the global race to the top.The proposed paper thus argues that China, although not a liberal society, is increasingly using governance techniques that remarkably resemble those used in the liberal society. In Foucault’s notion of governmentality, freedom is necessary to government. Individual's freedom is not a pre-given entity, but is a product of governmental steering through the desires, needs, interests, rights, and choices of individuals (Dean 1999, 149-175). Empirical materials for this paper derive from personal interviews I conducted in China and document analyses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]