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Short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss how medical anthropological research can critically examine the processes of shaping and operating the scientific expertise of biomedical knowledge in an authoritarian context, reflecting on my online ethnographies of China’s handling of COVID-19.

Long abstract:

This paper aims to discuss how medical anthropological research can critically examine the processes of shaping and operating the scientific expertise of producing, manipulating, and disseminating biomedical knowledge in an authoritarian context, reflecting on my online ethnographies of China’s handling of COVID-19. From 2020 to 2022, my research engaged with the knowledge production processes of COVID-19 infectious risks, the emergence and decline of outbreaks, and the effectiveness of the government’s intervention measures in various online spaces. The ethnographic data covers three angles of ‘knowing the pandemic’: how did the government strengthen its top-down indoctrination of specific biomedical knowledge as the ‘truths’ that every individual was obliged to accept; how did the community of public health, as the holder of scientific expertise, involve in the government’s domination; and how did individuals perceive, accept, and/or resist the epistemology that the government expected to establish. The analysis of these aspects aims to challenge the government’s domination of the epistemology of knowing the pandemic. I suggest that while the authoritarian government attempted to steer, control, and utilise the scientific discourses of infection-related biomedical knowledge in order to shape and operate a ‘regime of truth’, as anthropologists, we are supposed to enquire such truths’ factuality based on individuals’ gradually transforming perceptions and the scientific community’s changing positionalities. In this process, the scientific expertise of biomedical interpretations of COVID-19 became a medium between the government and individuals, reflecting the struggles of repressing or gaining subjectivity in the power relation of living the pandemic-situated life.