Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic in China: A Biopolitical Approach

The biopolitical management of populations during the COVID-19 pandemic has been evident all around the world, and even more pronounced in authoritarian regimes. This article substantiates the sociopolitical implications of the new practices of governance that emerged during the pandemic in China. Our research question reads as follows: How has China’s regime managed the COVID-19 pandemic and with what sociopolitical implications? We argue that China’s Party-State has used the pandemic to biopolitically engineer the Chinese nation. China’s political leadership has used the opportunity of the pandemic to further downsize the voice of national minority groups, eventually nullifying their right to political subjectivity and identity. And it has also implemented policies to discourage holders of foreign passports from returning or settling in China, implicating that foreign nationals may be now redundant in the country. Primarily on the basis of archival research and ethnography, we find that this biopolitical engineering has heavily relied on (Foucauldian) technologies of security and fear.