In my research, I examine the political discourses of the “reform and opening up” program introduced shortly after Mao Zedong's death, in 1978. In my interpretation, Deng Xiaoping, who initiated the reform, articulated a hegemonic discourse in the form of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ that essentially redefined the post-Mao Chinese social and economic order. Drawing on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Essex School), I seek to reconstruct and interpret the leadership discourses of the Chinese Communist Party leaders Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping as supplementing socialism with Chinese characteristics by shaping it to current social challenges.

Ferenc Tőkei, a Hungarian sinologist and Marxist thinker gained reputation for his involvement in the revival of the international discussion on the Asiatic mode of production in the 1960s. His 1965 Essays on the Asiatic Mode of Production was published in Magyar, English, and French in the same year. The stated objective of that book was to “take back” Marx’s concept from Karl August Wittfogel (author of the 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power), accordingly it contains an erudite philological analysis of Marxian references to the AMP and a historical materialist interpretation of the pre-revolutionary Chinese society as a case study.

The AMP is the “most controversial mode of production” and this can be traced back to several factors besides the lack of a clear and coherent definition throughout the Marxian corpus. On the level of the politics of knowledge, it displays an understanding of social formations in non-European societies from a genuinely European point of view arguably resulting in historical narratives of orientalist nature. Further controversy surrounding the AMP can be deduced from the socialist movement’s history and the institutionalization of Stalinism: after the mid-1930s maintaining the AMP was understood as Trotskyist deviation, hence it disappeared from Soviet intellectual discourse until the death of Stalin. Moreover, through Wittfogel’s work, it became intertwined with the critique of the static, imperial character of the Socialist Bloc.

Seemingly it is an interesting question how to interpret the return of the Asiatic mode of production into the institutionalized leftist discourse, especially in the context of progressive leftist ideas coming from the Global South, which were becoming increasingly popular in Europe, and at the same time, obviously, there are specific implications for the discourse in the post-1956 Hungarian People's Republic.

In my reading Tőkei as a dedicated apologist of existing socialism used the AMP in an attempt to de-imperialize the Socialist Bloc by 1) overcoming the Stalinist silencing of the concept; 2) conceptually undermining the imperial criticism raised by the “revisionist” Wittfogel; 3) and by subtly discrediting the alternative “Maoist” socialism that accused the Soviet Union of imperialism.