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Whose Dream? Renmin (people) as a Floating Signifier in Contemporary China

Launched in 2012 by the current president Xi Jinping, the ‘Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ has become a key political concept, used to sum up China’s goal in the 21st century. Among the various descriptions provided in official documents and media as well as speeches and writings by Chinese politicians, a constant and steady feature is its being a dream of renmin, ‘the people’. Renmin is indeed a keyword in the ongoing discourse on the Chinese dream. Yet, what still needs to be uncovered is who is the renmin in Chinese official discourse? Who is included and who is excluded? This paper aims at answering these questions and analyzing the meanings covered by the signifier renmin in the political speeches by Xi Jinping as well as the political implications brought about by the act of naming who is the renmin. Moving from Laclau’s notion of floating signifiers (Laclau 2005; 2014), this paper argues that the meaning of renmin cannot be seen as given once and for all. On the contrary, the meaning of renmin is the unstable ‘result of a process of political becoming’ (Bosteel 2016: 5). In the specific Chinese context, renmin is the site of an ideological struggle taking place from a diachronic perspective. This is precisely because renmin still carries the ‘taste’ – to use Bakhtin’s terminology (Bakhtin 1981: 271–272) – of the meanings it used to cover in previous historical contexts. In a nutshell, uncovering who is the renmin and what act naming the renmin ‘does’ in contemporary Chinese politics contribute to shed light on the process of construction of a Chinese collective identity in the era of globalization. This, in turn, helps understand what the larger implications of such a way of shaping a collective identity are for China’s domestic and foreign policy.