NEW TIME, NEW AGENCY: THE SOCIAL-COGNITIVE CONCEPTIONS OF NEW TIME AMONG CHINESE POLITICAL ELITES, 1978–1992

Eugene Yu Ji, The University of Chicago

This paper presents a cognitive-behavioral framework for examining how political elites reconceptualize time and agency during crucial periods of sociopolitical change, with a focus on the shift in temporal imaginaries from revolutionary ideals to developmentalism among Chinese political leaders in the post-Mao era. Building on recent scholarship on sociopolitical time and the politics of newness (Xu & Reed 2023), transformative political decision-making (Ji 2025), and moral and decision-making philosophy (Callard 2018), this paper proposes a three-level social-cognitive framework for understanding elite conceptualizations of “new time”: (1) aspirational (transformation-driven; Callard 2018, Ji 2025), (2) projective (goal and pathway-driven, e.g., ideological debates, economic development strategies), and (3) operational (implementation and policy-driven, e.g., balancing market and state control). Empirically, I argue that the shift in Chinese elite politics from 1978 to 1992 can be understood as a social-cognitive recontextualization (Silverstein 1993) of time conception at the three levels of newness. This process involved reframing aspirational time from a revolutionary to a developmental ideal, stabilizing projective time as developmentalism, and concretizing operational time through development-driven policymaking and experimentation. Overall, this paper illuminates how political actors reconstruct, negotiate, and stabilize emerging sociopolitical temporalities in response to shifting ideological, sociopolitical, and geopolitical dynamics and conditions (Ji, 2025). References: Callard, Agnes. Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, Oxford University Press (2018). Ji, Eugene Yu, “Unraveling Authoritarian Reform Decision-making: A Metacognitive-Subcognitive Model” (February 18, 2025). Accepted in American Journal of Political Science, Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5143309. Silverstein, Michael. "Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function." In John Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 33-58. Cambridge University Press (1993). Xu, Xiaohong., & Reed, Isaac. A. “Modernity and the Politics of Newness: Unraveling New Time in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1968.” Sociological Theory, 41(3), 229-254 (2023).

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 Presented in Session 151. Contingency and Time in Historical Causality