Description
The biopolitical management of populations during the COVID19 pandemic has been observed all around the world, and it is even more pronounced in authoritarian regimes. This paper substantiates the socio-political implications of the new practices of governance that emerged during the pandemic in China. Our research question reads as follows: Has the Chinese leadership used the response to COVID19 as a strategic tool to reinforce the control of the Chinese population? We argue firstly that China’s Party-State has used the pandemic to biopolitically engineer the Chinese nation. On the one hand, China’s political leadership has further downsized national minority groups, eventually nullifying their right to political subjectivity and identity. On the other hand, the Chinese government has implemented mobility policies to discourage holders of foreign passports from coming or returning to China, from operating professionally or planning to settle down in the country, implicating that foreign nationals are now redundant in China. All these occur by means of governmental practices of security and fear. The article commences with the existing biopolitical readings of the pandemic’s management. It then genealogically investigates governmental practices of security and fear embedded in China’s response to the pandemic, with a focus on the Other (minority groups and foreigners). The ensuing section elaborates on the socio-political implications of these governmental practices, fleshing out the biopolitical engineering of the Chinese nation. The concluding remarks pave the way for future research.
