Sorace, C. (2025). Life First: Pandemic Biopolitics in China. Political Theory, 0(0).
https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917251323747
Abstract
China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic could be described as a lesson directly from the pages of Foucault. For nearly three years, China’s vast state apparatus and society were mobilized around the goal of protecting life until November 2023, when people took to the streets calling for an end to lockdowns. In the West, the A4 protests, as they came to be called, are solidifying in public memory as a cautionary tale for Western governments who want to emulate China’s autocracy. However, China’s pandemic response was not always viewed as a negative instance of state power. In the first two years of the pandemic, China was viewed by many across the globe as a model of positive biopolitics. Consequently, China’s pandemic response divides biopolitical theory in two. Either state power was deployed to protect people’s lives, or the protection of life was used to justify the concentration of state power. China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic dialectically contains both poles of biopolitics. If the pandemic was a lesson, it is uncertain what is to be learned. This essay argues that the biopolitical binary of state power and resistance might not be the most helpful conceptual framework for making sense of the pandemic. It concludes with a search for non-biopolitical forms of embodiment in abject works of art in China from before the pandemic.
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