Paper short abstract:

A critical account of China’s dynamic zero Covid19 policies. Instead of lockdown or freedom, the normalization of biobordering in China creates new qualities of social life and new forms of social death. Normalization of biobordering not a singular policy but experiments in total human management.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides a critical account of the implementation of China’s ‘dynamic zero Covid-19’ policies with a particular focus on the Shanghai lockdown of March-May 2022. Other than Shanghai, China’s zero tolerance for COVID-19 has required few city-wide lockdowns since the initial outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020. Instead, China has kept case numbers low through a combination of sealed borders, regular mass testing, the implementation of evolving digital track and trace programs and rapid-response mobility restrictions targeted to the inhabitants of neighbourhoods, streets, or residences. However, the total lockdown of Shanghai, and the internment of covid positive patients in makeshift concentration camps, produced widespread dissent that threw China’s COVID-19 policy into critical relief. I argue that we should not consider China’s policy in terms of a contestation between political dogma or economic rationality, as it is often framed, but as a terrain of experimentation for developing new bio-technological response systems for the complete management of human populations. China’s a singular commitment to digitally managed biobordering, with Shanghai as an extreme case, belies great regional and temporal variation. Collectively, regional experiments in covid biobordering have legitimised new forms of enclosure whether they are enacted or not. In this way, it no longer makes sense to think of lockdowns or freedom of mobility in digital terms – as either or – but in terms of an infinite array of analog possibilities – greater or lesser unfreedom, that simultaneously create new qualities of social life and new forms of social death.