Informed by rhetorical studies, this study critically inventories the discursive fragments and political styles deployed by two private entrepreneurs in contemporary China who strove for social mobility, class status, and political clout through communicative as well as economic means. Structured around two case studies, it asks how a common pool of symbolic resources and their ideological import were appropriated differently by what I take to be representatives of two species of entrepreneurs---one heroic, authoritative, the other comic, "concoctive"---as they stylized their self presentations, rehearsed their motives, reshaped the social landscape, and reworked the political culture. I take the heroic style, which is defined by the near absence of unofficial symbolic materials, as culturally schizophrenic and politically regressive. The comic style, by contrast, tropologically tricks the "petrified narrow seriousness" of official discourse and recovers the multivocality repressed therein. It bespeaks the disposition for deep listening, maintains an ongoing dialogue with folk wisdom, and gives presence to vital cultural symbols. In a very fundamental sense, the comic style embodies constructive dissent and promotes democratic values.;By exploring the ingratiatory efficacy and constitutive power of never-neutral discursive performances and political theatrics as staged by the two private entrepreneurs either in lockstep with or in distinction from official political communication, this study critiques hegemony as a species of nihilism and affirms vitalism as a desirable mode of dissent. It presents "rhetoric," with a lower-case "r," as a sensibility-praxis that promises to enable the multifold disempowered multitude in transition-period China to comically invent "new possibilities of life" and repossess the top-down Reform program.
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