Biopower, Sovereign Power, and Authoritarianism: Subjection and Resistance during China’s Digitalized Covid-Era

Introduction

Since early 2020, the world has encountered a crisis on a global scale due to the sweeping force of the Covid-19 pandemic. After two years of battle, many nation-states had begun to relax their health regulations regarding this epidemic on the basis of sufficient vaccination coverage that curtailed the impact of the virus. Just when many thought the curtain was slowly closing on the theatre stage where the global pandemic played its leading role, China commenced the third act with exceedingly urgent measures to clear the virus within its state borders, known as the “zero-covid” policy. Initiated by the government of China, it aimed to eradicate covid within its zone of governance dynamically. This measure was criticized by the WHO in May of 2022 in terms of its unsustainability (Taylor, 2022), specifically regarding the enforcement of population regulations manifested in prolonged lockdowns, mandatory testing and quarantine, and digital tracking of individual health and movements. During this process, operational accidents kept occurring. Many lives were lost due to the uncompromising nature of these regulations, where both the sovereign power and the Foucauldian biopower were entrenched throughout.

For most of history, before the rise of nation-states, sovereign power depended upon the ability to impose death upon its subjects (Foucault, 1990, p.135). Beginning in the 18th century, when liberal rationality was born out of the enlightenment emphasis on individual freedom, nation-states with liberal governments began their formations (Hobsbawm, 1990; Anderson, 1991). Once the libertarian governments seized authority over the territorialized local religions and formed nation-states, the power of the sovereign to decide life and death was no longer as absolute and extreme as before. Only when its own legitimacy is being questioned could it respond with the right to “take life” and “let live” to sustain itself. (Foucault, 1990, p.136). One might say that it is only when, in states of exception (Agamben, 2005), authoritarian leaders rise above the juridical order to suspend the norm of governing at a distance and directly manage life and death with force.

In modern nation-states that require productive subjects to maintain their economic prosperity and national competence against other powers, the sovereign power gradually ceded its absoluteness to a more muted form of power in the name of administering life. Biopower began to be operated by regimes as a disciplinary control method that aims “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order” (Foucault, 1990, p. 138). This power operates on two levels: as micro disciplines of the body to achieve docility and optimized productivity; and as macro regulations on the species body through biological processes such as reproduction and health (Foucault, 1990, p. 139). Biopolitics then situates biopower in the center of a web of economic and political forces to “optimize a state of life” (Foucault, 2003, p.246) at the aggregate level of the population, which is apt to describe the stringent social control under the zero covid policy that “fosters life or disallows it to the point of death” (Foucault, 1990, p. 138). And this process resulted in many unfortunate incidents due to the all-encompassing health practices prioritizing covid patients over others’ livelihood.

This essay will examine Chinese biopolitics related to Covid-19. It pays special attention to the imposition of biopower through authoritarianism, which is only made possible by rigorous sovereign power. I also examine how the state of China employs these two forms of institutional power to subdue protests and regulate its subjects in a volatile political climate. I argue that the interplay of biopower and sovereign power is a key mechanism for authoritarian states to form ideal subjects with docile yet productive bodies that accomplish biopolitical projects and comply with the sovereign order.

 Biopolitics in the Digital Age

The more than 1.3 billion Chinese people were never strangers to biopolitics on the macro level. The bio-natalist project started in the post-reform years since the 1980s proposed the ethnonational one-child policy to engineer demographics and control birth rates for social and economic purposes that emphasized reducing the population quantity and raising its quality of life to produce a modernized workforce in the global capitalist system (Greenhalgh, 2009, pp.209-212). In the 21st century, Covid-19 presents another significant case of a biopolitical policy. Throughout the past three years, many techniques of discipline were utilized to enforce biopower and discipline the population.

In the first five months of 2020, even though the metropolis of Beijing never went through a tight lockdown as Wuhan, this capital city also entered a state of emergency guided by biopolitical practices of disease control. Since January 24th, 20 hospitals, one make-shift temporary hospital, 76 fever clinics, and community-level health centers have been dedicated to positive and suspected covid cases with the goal of allocating appropriate medical resources and suppressing the rate of infections to avoid massive breakouts (Li, 2021, p.810). Without vaccinations available, quarantine policies were introduced to complement the responses organized by the healthcare sector, where “spatial partitioning and subdivision of a population” (Foucault, 2004, p.47) was the most effective to slow down the development of an epidemic. Bodies were confined to segregated grids sectioned out by local compounds with barriers installed at exits. Groceries and necessities were purchased and allocated at the grid level by community volunteers. These volunteers were also recruited to act as guards for the grids to ensure face masks were always worn and to check the digital health code for anyone who attempted to enter the compounds or any public facilities such as grocery stores.

The digital tracking health app on covid was swiftly introduced to the public by the middle of February. It was developed by the private enterprise Alibaba and became a necessity for all Chinese citizens to participate in the social and mobile aspects of society. This app contains a person’s name, address, official identification document, travel history, and testing results. If a person was potentially exposed to covid or travelled to a geographic region with a high density of infections, this app will assign a red code to impede the person from travelling further to any public area. Furthermore, the grid-work control system in Beijing, with over 260,000 personnel on board, was also managed with digitalized technologies such as remote sensing, geographic information systems, and global positioning systems (Li, 2021, p.811).

These digital control methods, such as surveillance cameras that monitored mobilities and the health apps that digitally reported mandatory testing results and travel histories to the nationwide information system, were operated as technologies of subjection. And these digital tools became a social norm as part of the governmentality that altered the behaviors of state subjects by embedding digital technologies as inseparable elements from daily lives. These technologies intensified the biopower intended to regulate movements and maintain acquiescence among social bodies by multiplying the precision and efficacy of social controls. And only through this elevated form of meticulous demography that instrumentalizes biopower in digital technologies could bio-governance in mega-cities of modern nations be systematically organized. Such that in the past three years, more than 70 cities with total populations of over 300 million people in China experienced similar urban management as in the case of Beijing (Gan & Den, 2022). Nevertheless, it is important to understand that the capacity of biopower relies on an assertive sovereign power to execute its components, such that productive forces are compelled, and resources are utilized optimally.

Optimized Sovereign Power through Authoritarianism

Covid-19 epitomizes the state of exception, where the sovereign power is arguably threatened, not only by the potential harm to the vitality of its subjects but also by political and social pressure from competing powers that seek to vitiate its governing capability and take advantage of its vulnerable economy. To administer lives, halt any concerns about the sovereign government as incompetent, and avoid economic stagnation or decline, sovereign power must also take charge to forcibly implement the biopolitical project. In general, covid response in China went through two phases, with the first being the phase of information repression and the second being the phase of active mobilization. During each phase, sovereign power worked together with authoritarian schemes to transcend state institutions in the state of exception to strategically manipulate tangible and intangible resources and achieve biopolitical goals.

During the first phase, information about the initial discovery of covid-19 cases was primarily controlled by the government and hidden by the media in the hope of avoiding social unrest. In March 2020, Doctor Ai Fen of Wuhan Central Hospital revealed in an interview with Renwu magazine that she started to receive patients with flu-like symptoms in December of 2019, whose virus reports indicated the containment of SARS coronavirus (The Guardian, 2020). This information quickly began circulation in Wuhan’s medical circles. However, the doctors who alerted the hospital were reprimanded by the disciplinary committee and detained by the local police for spreading rumors (Shih, 2021, p.68). Dr. Li Wenliang was also among them, whose private post on Chinese social media alerting his friends and relatives to take precautions went viral on the internet. He was later accredited to be the whistleblower of the virus. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Li’s death on February 7th due to covid sparked public outrage against the authoritarian repression of information and the lack of governmental accountability.

In this phase, sovereign power is reflected by the “right to seizure” (Foucault, 1990, p.136) of bodies and information. Partially, the censorship of early discoveries can be attributed to the government’s doxastic anxiety, where clarity on new infectious diseases implies serious response effort and potential disastrous medical and social consequences. Therefore, to ensure social stability, the information was controlled to avoid any further dissemination on mainstream media platforms, and the bodies that released the information were deprived of their freedom in arbitrary detention. Here, authoritarianism came into effect through sovereign power where the information ecosystem was manipulated by the governmental body, which instead resulted in official disinformation about the whistleblowers as rumour conveyors who misled the public about the existence of “pneumonia of unknown origins”. Eventually, through information authoritarianism that controlled society’s access to accurate and timely data on covid, the sovereign power’s right to manage lives culminated in the form of suppression where it only “seizes hold of life in order to repress it” (Foucault, 1990, p.136).

Officially, phase two of covid began on January 20th, 2020, when China Central Television broadcasted an interview with Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who is an expert on infectious disease and confirmed human-to-human transmission based on more than 100 cases of covid-19 announced by the Wuhan Health Commission (Shih, 2021, p.70). This news on the major media platform, which is widely regarded as the press outlet for the central government in China, marked the beginning of the phase of active mobilization with an almost 3-month-long lockdown in Wuhan and followed by a series of actions outlined in the last section.

In the second phase, sovereign power steps in to exercise the biopower that aims to maintain the vitalities of the population in covid and enforce social controls that are otherwise impossible missions. To properly allocate resources from the rest of the nation to the regions of need, organize urban segregations into local entities, as well as develop and mandate digital tracking technologies, an exceptional sovereign power is needed to rise above usual institutional norms of operations and legitimately appropriate the productivities of its subjects and execute the labour-intensive control measures. Moreover, the “subtraction mechanism” (Foucault, 1990, p.136) of sovereign power that freely submits lives under subjection to optimize governmental goals is most effective under an authoritarian government. And this authoritarianism is inevitably digital, so the efficacy of bio-governance is the most advanced. This digital authoritarianism is enabled by technologies such as health apps to widen and magnify its surveillance of populations and expand political control. With the information gathered expeditiously through digital technologies, the sovereign power establishes an invisible “panopticon” (Foucault, 1991) that necessitates governmentality among its subjects. For example, in December 2020, a covid patient in Szechuan was cyberbullied due to the open access to her travel history online that contained multiple public sites of entertainment at a time when she was unaware of her later positive test result (Liu, 2020). Because of the authoritarian sovereign power, digital tracking apps were manufactured, and the publicization of private personal data was allowed. It then enabled upgrades to governmentality that enforced self-governing body disciplines that reciprocally shamed those that were out of bounds. Under the collaboration between sovereign power and digital authoritarianism, state subjects are governed more productively and ruthlessly.

Overall, sovereign power is shown to be a key driver for biopolitics to be most effective in covid measures. When sovereign power is employed by an authoritarian government in the digital age, its right to seize and appropriate resources is further augmented by technologies of improved speed and accuracy. These technologies are rooted in agnotological strategies for the sovereign power to control information access and enhance oppressive forms of governmentality.

Resistance Against the Institutional Powers

In the year 2022, people in China were bombarded with news of deaths that were unrelated to covid itself but were the byproducts of the zero covid policy. Recently, on September 18th, 27 people died on the way to a suburban quarantine facility due to a traffic accident. On the bus, there was only one positive case of covid among the 47 people whom all lived in one residential compound in Guiyang city (Yuan, 2022a). This tragic event triggered a nationwide mourning that unveiled people’s discontent and traumatic fear of these stringent regulations. Just two months later, on November 24th, a fire broke out in one residential compound located in the city of Urumqi, and more than 10 people died (Shepherd & Kuo, 2022). These were also deaths resulting from the policy because of delayed emergency response under the city-wide lockdown that began in August, where people could not leave the building with all exits locked, and the fire trucks could not reach the building close enough due to limitations of movement. Finally, this accident became the last straw that crushed people’s tolerance of the zero covid policy and finally sparked a series of protests on the streets of Chinese cities such as Urumqi, Shanghai, and Beijing.

Very quickly, in two days, these protests transformed into one massive public demonstration in a creative and subtle method where people held blank sheets of paper to deliver the elusive yet deeply ironic message of repressed individual rights under covid measures and the deprived democracy in general (Che & Chien, 2022). This is the “White Paper Revolution,” or “A4 Revolution”, which started as efforts of resistance against the biopower of health restrictions but at the same time transformed itself into an oppositional force against the authoritarian sovereign power. Authoritarian regimes mostly contain an antagonistic relationship evidenced between a hegemonic power structure and its subjects of subordination. In these states, disruptive forms of protests are less likely to be carried out with a leviathan-like sovereign power with modern tools of information communication technologies instead of guillotines. Nevertheless, the most recent “White Paper Revolution” still managed to break the historical record to be one of the biggest grassroots social movements in China’s modern history.

During these protests, Chinese citizens gathered on the streets with names of “Urumqi” that are largely seen in various cities across China, holding blank papers, citing poems, and singing songs such as l’internationale and the national anthem. These acts carry significant energies of subversion in their satirical natures. For example, the first line of lyrics in the national anthem says, “Arise! All those who don't want to be slaves”, encouraging people to take back the stifled autonomies under a coerciveness of extreme bio-governance. Of course, blunt slogans were shouted as well, borrowing from the “protest prophet” (Yuan, 2022b), Peng Lifa, who posted a banner on a highway crossover in central Beijing in October 2022 that reads,

"We want food, not covid tests.

We want reform, not Cultural Revolution.

We want freedom, not lockdown.

We want votes, not a leader.

We want dignity, not lies.

We are citizens, not slaves."

Peng’s brave act mobilized people around the world to follow suit and inspired many versions of these verses that included feminist and queer voices of dissent from the patriarchal orders as well. University students across nations also posted posters with different versions of these words on campuses. Later, during the “White Paper Revolution,” people around the world also protested in front of Chinese embassies. These globally connected actions were made possible mainly due to digital technologies. Unlike what Marcuse envisioned of a post-modern dissolution of communities into atomic and one-dimensional individuals subjected to technological functions that build a sad euphoria of convenience (1964), internet technologies reinvigorated a class-like consciousness by facilitating actions that transcend geographical bounds. However, this global movement is very much ethnonational in its core constituents, participated mostly by the ethnically Chinese diaspora across the world who were compelled by a national sentiment of a troubled homeland.

Authoritarian governments are deeply aware of the explosive nature of the use of communication technologies such as social media. Therefore, it closely monitors organizing efforts online through digital data collection and censorship (Cai & Zhou, 2016). In the protest of Shanghai, it reacted fast through biopolitical measures that answered to a forceful sovereign power to alter behaviors and make bodies conform. Police removed the street signs that read “Urumqi Rd.” in Shanghai (Yang, 2022), hoping to ease the protest behaviors. This action can be interpreted as a passive technique of body discipline. By reversing the spatial bounds that motivate subjects to gather, the sovereign power dissolves the political significance of space to discourage disruptive body movements within that space.

Digitally, information repression echoes again, with every post about the protest instantly deleted and a stacking pile of sensitive words that private companies of social media use to censor dissents and track down the authors. Moreover, as part of digital authoritarianism, foreign social media is not allowed in China. On the streets of Shanghai, police surveil young people by searching their phones for banned apps such as “Instagram” and “Twitter” (Tan & McGarvey) and records their parents’ information to put pressure on potential protesters. In China, relation repression is often used as a technique to exploit social and family ties and defuse resistance. They are often deployed prior to protests to instill psychological pressure on people by leveraging their relationships as bargaining chips for potential mediation in the future (O’Brien & Deng, 2017, p.182). Furthermore, digital authoritarianism collaborates with private enterprises to control behaviors, such as how Alibaba created the health app to be used for mobility and covid tracking. Just when protesters resorted to using the AirDrop function on Apple phones to share political information with random people on the streets, Apple restricted this function in an update of its operating system in phones sold to mainland China (Gilchrist, 2022). These efforts to alter the digital behaviors of citizens can be seen from the biopolitical angle, where bodies were directed to comply with regulations by changing their habits of using digital technologies. And this behavioral change ultimately benefits the sovereign power to manipulate public information and keep track of transgression.

When necessary, the sovereign power will declare its right to seize by detaining protesters observed through security cameras or online censorship. For example, the protestor Yang Zijin, with the nickname Dian Xin (Dim Sum), was arrested one week later at home by local police who pretended as community workers on duty so that they could bait consented entrance to Yang’s residence (AFP, 2022). Currently, on December 29th, Yang is still detained in Guangzhou by the State Security offices and continuously denied legal representation. Yang’s family still wasn’t allowed visitation rights and was pressured to not release any information to foreign media outlets.

This arrest is apparently the product of digital authoritarianism, where Yang’s information became easily accessible. Since the protests broke out, many people’s WeChat accounts were suspended for sharing political opinions that threatened the sovereign legitimacy. In Yang’s case, relational and information repression were also employed to avoid any media exposure by notable foreign channels. However, no matter how fierce the sovereign power is to silence attention on unlawful arrests, many social media accounts are dedicated to following up on Yang’s case, such as the Instagram account “freedianxin”. Many young people were motivated by Yang’s previous efforts to promote social justice for marginalized groups on Chinese social media and devoted themselves to championing justice for Yang and other arrested protestors.

Here, in the aftermath of protests, we still see biopower and sovereign power working collectively to monitor and intervene in body behaviors and deploy life-threatening punishments. And this process is crystallized and expedited under digital authoritarianism that collaborates with neoliberal enterprises to control accurate data of state subjects. In the end, biopower and sovereign power were both presents during the tail-end of the covid-era, mechanically operated to cease the social unrest that eventually broke out against authoritarian measures.

Conclusion

On December 7th, China lifted the zero covid policy (Mao, 2022), suspending mandatory testing, the health app, and the stay-at-home orders. However, this sudden U-turn of health regulations is another prime example of sovereign power in terms of its vast capacity to enforce or relax nationwide restrictions that impact people’s lives. This abrupt decision did not come with a gradual plan in stages but an immediate eradication of all domestic restrictions on mobility. Therefore, it is crucial to read the sub-contexts of this sharp change of direction not just as successful outcomes of protests but also as a desperate decision made by authoritarian regimes to protect the sovereign power from active threats. The road ahead is not clear due to the low vaccination rates among seniors and the limitations on medical resources, and signs of shortages and growing death rates of seniors are already apparent. In turn, media messages are maneuvered again to control social behaviors of preventative consumption and excessive storage of medications by painting covid symptoms as equating to that of a simple cold. At the end of the tunnel, sovereign power is still taking charge to reach the biopolitical goal of regulating behaviors and sustaining lives.

Overall, throughout the three years of China’s covid era, biopower could not have been paradigmatically implemented at every level if not because of authoritarian sovereign power. And the most effective technology of subjugation in the 21st century is digital. The sovereign power propelled productive forces to effect digital tools that more accurately realize biopolitics, and it, in turn, navigates through information autocracy for agnotological ends. To regulate state subjects, sovereign power extracted productive labours with punitive implications and ensured the vitality of the aggregate population by functioning on biopower.

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