Kerim Friedman 傅可恩"There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a biopolitical commitment to maintaining life in a pandemic … the problem is that the CCP’s overwhelming priority is its own legitimacy, with viral suppression becoming the locus of legitimising narratives during the pandemic. In this sense, the biosecurity embodied in China’s response to Covid-19 was less about ‘the securing of collective life against risk’, and more about securing the life of the Party."
Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests)
On 26 November 2022, prompted by a deadly fire in a highrise apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, protesters took to streets and university campuses across China calling for an end to the country’s restrictive ‘zero Covid’ policy (清零政策) (Davidson and Yu 2022). Unsurprisingly, the libertarian right, anti-maskers, and […]