China’s Zero Covid Policy: Unsustainable Health Management Through Digitalized Biopolitics
Introduction
Just past midnight on Sept 18, 2022, when people in Guiyang city of southwest China entered a peaceful night of sleep, a traumatic event that would later trigger nationwide mourning slowly began to unfold. And it started with just one positive Covid case in a residential compound of 47 people.
Guizhou province, where Guiyang is the capital city, had been under tight control of lockdown measures for September due to several hundred Covid cases (L. Yuan, 2022). With the zero covid target deadline of the 19th approaching fast province-wide, the 47 people in Guiyang city were rushed onto a bus to be transferred to a temporary quarantine site, an eight-hour drive away. At 2:40 a.m., the bus crashed in an accident, resulting in 27 deaths and 20 injuries. People all over the nation were outraged, with three years of politicized covid-trauma relived through these 47 people. "We're on that bus, too" (L.Yuan, 2022), as people said with deep empathy and desperation under the authoritarian measures of the zero covid policy, which aims to dynamically clear the trace of the virus entirely inside the state border.
Reflecting on this tragedy, I will provide an overview of the regulations implemented as part of the zero covid policy in China for the past three years. I also critique the policy regarding its unsustainability and multiplied biopower in the digital age. Throughout the essay, I highlight people’s experiences in response to unsustainable health management and its coercive biopower.
Sustainability of Zero Covid Policy
The covid outbreak in 2020 first hit the global news in Wuhan, China, with lockdowns beginning on Jan 23, 2020, for over two months. Travel was banned in and out of the city, with no privately operated vehicles allowed on the street. Urban compounds and communities were guarded by inspectors who registered and checked the body temperature of every passenger who attempted to enter. Grocery and necessities were centrally distributed, ridding every resident of the right to exit their compounds. From then on, these disease control methods in adherence to the zero covid policy had only become more stringent in the following three years.
During both pre-vaccination and post-vaccination eras, regional lockdowns continued with just one positive case reported. Quarantine in non-urban facilities remained a mandatory practice for all tested positive. And in the tragedy of Guiyang City, it was exercised to the extremist form under severe policy pressure, which included all close contacts regardless of their covid test results. Across the country, travel had become highly troublesome. Developed only eight weeks after the Wuhan outbreak, a health app allowed CDC to track the mandatory daily covid testing of all existing patients and travelers. International travel into the country also required mandatory quarantine in designated hotels for as long as 28 days.
Comparing death rates of covid in mainland China and other countries in the last two years, China reported 5000 deaths while 6 million deaths occurred outside of its borders (S. Yuan, 2022). One may conclude the zero covid policy to be adequate and effective. However, do the statistics include deaths due to authoritarian measures, such as in the Guiyang accident? Nevertheless, preventable policy-incurred accidents occurred constantly. During the two-month lockdown in Shanghai since April 2022, there had been massive complaints about the food supply shortage and lack of access to regular medical care (S. Yuan, 2022). I received first-hand accounts from friends who lived with considerable anxiety under the resource shortage and resorted to ordering overpriced groceries, which were limitedly available on a first-come-first-served basis online. I also saw people on social media seeking public attention to medical emergencies of their family members in the hope of accessing hospitals that were strictly dedicated to covid. However, people still died, not due to covid, but due to the social control of it. And it all transpired in one of the most economically privileged cities in the world.
These policy-incurred deaths invoked criticisms over the internet, where people felt they were being held hostage by the zero covid policy, losing autonomy over their lives (L. Yuan, 2022). The question of sustainability of this form of covid management becomes more urgent than ever. In May of 2022, Lancet reported that in mainland China, just over 50% of people over age 80 had received two doses of vaccines, and less than 20% had received a booster (S. Yuan, 2022). One of the contributors to the low vaccination rate among the most vulnerable population is precisely the demanding policy itself. Seniors felt no urgency to be vaccinated under such rigid disease control. What could be more unsustainable when labour-intensive lockdowns that cause unnecessary deaths can be replaced by better vaccination coverage?
Unsurprisingly, on May 10, the WHO commented on the zero covid policy to be unsustainable (Taylor, 2022). And since this most recent tragedy in Guiyang prompted another major public outcry after the death of the whistleblower, Wenliang Li, in February 2020, people demand changes to the zero covid strategies. It pains me to ask, why haven't strict controls been implemented on vaccinations among seniors instead? Why transfer asymptomatic cases or negative cases to quarantine at all? Under the interplay of sovereign power and biopower, the mechanic operations of body discipline enforced by zero covid policy had stopped people from being human beings that employ sensibility and judgments to exercise self-directed decisions, and this process of enforcement is worth examining.
Augmented Body Discipline in the Digital Age
Foucault's biopolitics outlined a disciplinary control based on political rationality that aims "to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order" (Foucault, 1990, p. 138), which is apt to describe the unsustainable social control enforced by the zero covid policy that aims to first and foremost protect certain lives. The biopower that "fosters life or disallows it to the point of death" (Foucault, 1990, p. 138) is exemplified through the unfortunate policy-incurred deaths under unsustainable health practices as conditions for covid patients to live. Through spatial separation that differentiates people into categories of covid and non-covid, monitoring of body temperature, and restrictions on mobility, biopower is embedded in covid policies to discipline the population to be regulated by orderly activities such as daily testing and compulsory quarantine. However, in the digital age, coercive biopower arguably intensifies with better tools available.
The operation of the zero covid policy is technology-laden. In 2020, although Beijing was never formally locked down, this capital city also went through a state of 'war .' In addition to more than 260,000 personnel on board, covid regulations were also operated with technologies such as remote sensing, geographic information systems, and global positioning systems (Li, 2021). These technologies installed provided even harsher surveillance on the subject bodies. In December 2020, a covid patient was cyberbullied after her personal information and recent travel history in Sichuan were posted online (Liu, 2020). She was blamed for having excessively traveled to multiple public spaces even though she was unaware of her later positive test result at the time. In this case, governmentality upgraded its capability through digital tracking of mobilities. The biopower effectively creates docile bodies who govern each other more timely and publicly through the internet in the form of shame when bodies are "out of place ." Technology has productively augmented body disciplines to be more expeditious and ruthless.
More recently, on Sept 28, some security footage appeared on Chinese social media and sparked another wave of criticism of covid policies. In the video, a man was eating alone inside his empty restaurant, and two covid regulators asked him to put on his mask. The owner's response perfectly encapsulates this encounter's absurdity, "you are all insane!". Biopolitics was executed so effectively that mask-wearing became the norm, and every exception awaits discipline. Later, the person who uploaded this video received pressure from an unknown caller to delete the video, or else severe consequences would follow. In their recorded conversation, the caller insistently refused to reveal his identity and posed inane threats constantly. How accurately does this scenario model the panopticon (Foucault, 1991)? The sovereign power remains unseen, yet all bodies are watched more closely and efficiently under digital technologies.
The panopticon never takes a rest in the digital age. In the case of the Guiyang accident, even though the two related hashtags on Chinese social media each had one billion views, they never made it to the list of hot topics (L. Yuan, 2022). Even though the panopticon is reconstructed to reach a new height through technologies, deleting any articles or posts that dared to object to the impractical and repressive disease control methods, the digital age also valorized any voice of dissent by thousands of decibels. My personal social media account was flooded with anger and revolt, and so were Caixin magazine, the New York Times, CBC, ABC, and many more channels. In the end, the digital age also provides its forms of resistance.
Conclusion
Despite the unsustainability of the zero covid policy with unnecessary costs of labour, money, and lives, it was still executed according to plan through the reified biopower in the digital age. Of course, technologies amplified the repression under body-disciplining health management, but it also presents alternative routes to invert the power relationship with media attention and grassroots involvement. Ultimately, I see a Marxist light at the end of the channel, where people make their own history, despite not being in conditions of their choosing.
Works Cited
Li, M. (2021). Biopolitical Practices in Beijing. European Review, 29(6), 805-818.
Liu, C. (2020, December 8). Female Covid-19 patient in Chengdu bullied online as personal info being leaked. Global Times. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1209326.shtml
Taylor, L. (2022). Covid-19: WHO chief calls for a shift in China’s “unsustainable” policy. BMJ: British Medical Journal (Online), 377https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o1199
Yuan, L. (2022, September 21). 'we're on that bus, too': In China, a deadly crash triggers Covid Trauma. The New York Times. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/business/china-covid-zero-policy-bus-crash.html
Yuan, S. (2022). Zero COVID in China: what next? The Lancet, 399(10338), 1856-1857. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00873-X
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: Volume 1, an introduction. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
