Episode 1 | Legacies of Covid-19

For the inaugural episode of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with Jing Wang and Christian Sorace about the legacies of Covid-19, five years after the novel coronavirus upended all of our lives.

At another moment of global fear and uncertainty, what lessons can we draw from those early days—and what questions still demand answers? What was it like for people inhabiting racialised bodies or leading transnational lives? How did governments appropriate public health for political gains? And how have Chinese communities sought joy amidst grief and inscribed memory against censorship?

Join us for a wide-ranging conversation that explores these questions and more.

Guest Bios:

Jing Wang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research sits at the intersection of global communication, media technology, and public cultures. She is also a podcaster, archivist, curator, translator, and co-founder of TyingKnots.

Christian Sorace is a Lecturer of Global China at the University of Cambridge and the author of Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017). His work explores political concepts and practices in China and Mongolia, spanning the study of ideology, discourse, urban planning, air pollution, and aesthetics.

Related Materials:

‘四月之声 | The Sound of April.’ An audio compilation from the Shanghai lockdown in 2022 on YouTube. Link.

Sorace, Christian, and Nicholas Loubere. 2022. ‘Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests).’ Made in China Journal 7(2): 32–39. Link.

Wang, Jing. 2022. ‘Lockdown Sound Diaries.’ Made in China Journal 7(1): 15161. Link.

Full episode transcript:

Yangyang Cheng: Hello everyone! Welcome to the inaugural episode of  开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, a new podcast from the Made in China Journal and the Global China Lab. I’m your host, Yangyang Cheng. Each month I’ll interview one or two guests, and together we will a topic on Chinese politics and society and the greater Sinophone world.

When my colleagues and I were discussing potential subjects for our pilot episode, very quickly we converged on one theme: Covid-19. It has been just over five years since our lives were turned upside down by the novel coronavirus. So much has changed. Yet, it also feels like too many have been too eager to go back to the old ways, “a return to normal” as one might say, while much of the lessons from the pandemic remain unlearned.

Five years later, we find ourselves again at a historic juncture, facing uncertainties, negotiating with our fears, and taking stock of our collective agency and powers. As a new wave of infections sweep China, and debates about vaccination are back in the headlines in the US, I am so grateful to have this conversation on a five-year retrospective on Covid-19 with two scholars whose works I have learned so much from, including through their essays in the Made in China Journal.

Thank you so much for joining us. So first of all, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners. Let’s start with Jing Wang.

Jing Wang: Hi, Yangyang. Thank you for inviting me. Hi, Christian. My name is Jing Wang. Currently, I’m an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So basically, I’m based in Wisconsin, a deeply purple state in the Midwestern United States.

Yangyang Cheng: Yes, and I will also mention that Jing is also a co-founder and co-editor of a platform that I’m a big fan of called Jie Sheng Zhi Tai Naut. That is a platform for transnational Chinese voices and stories. And we also have with us Christian Sorace, whose last name I just learned sounds like the hot sauce.

Christian Sorace: Hi, thank you so much for inviting me today. I’m Christian Sorace. I am a lecturer of global China at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Corpus Christi College. And I’m currently been working on a book on Mongolia and political theory. So excited to talk to both of you today.

Yangyang Cheng: Fascinating. And Christian is also an editor at the Made in China Journal. So we at times meet each other on the page, but this is the first time we meet in conversation. And so to begin, I would like to take us back to five years ago when we first learned about something called the novel coronavirus. And gosh, I cannot believe it has been five years, right? It feels like both it’s like yesterday, but also like a lifetime ago. So if we may, let’s start with Jing. I know that you were in China at the time at the beginning of 2020, right? When did you first hear about the coronavirus and what was your experience like in general at the time?

Jing Wang: Yeah, indeed. When the COVID-19 first broke out as the beginning of the 2020, I was in China. In fact, I went back to China in mid 2019 because I joined a postdoctoral position at NYU Shanghai. So when the COVID broke out, I was actually on winter vacation and enjoying spring festival with my parents and their two lovely dogs at the time. The first time I remember when I heard about this novel virus, it was actually some sort of rumors spreading on social media, but also some kind of news. However, the news was sort of vague. It was saying there was some kind of maybe severe flu or cold circling around in the Wuhan, mid China region. And the expert warned that we should be careful. However, in social media, there are more stories about this might be another SARS-like thing. If people remember SARS with something happened in early 2000 in China. So that was a time when I first heard about it while in the winter vacation. And then a week before the new year Eve, that year Wuhan was under total lockdown. So that was a time when we realized, oh my gosh, this thing became really big and serious. And then right after the whole residential community we lived in, in my hometown also went through lockdowns, just like so many other communities throughout China. And I remember I had a lot of mixed feelings at the time. It was really surreal. I felt really confused and frightened and also sort of angry because we didn’t have the full information. So yeah, it was a really difficult time thinking back.

Yangyang Cheng: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you mentioned the SARS epidemic, right? This was in 2003. And I remember I was in middle school at the time and I was preparing for the high school entrance exam. And because we lived very far away from the few epicenters it felt like just like something that was still in the distance and it felt like in retrospect, like a footnote to my crazy exam preparation time at the time. But later on when I speak with friends from Hong Kong or from Beijing who were at some of the SARS epicenters and their experiences were very different. So part of me also feel that even when there’s a virus that spreads and affects everyone, there is still like people’s experiences and feelings and perceptions are shaped by the power of proximity. And that was felt very cleanly, I feel, five years ago when COVID-19 just started. And I was living in Chicago at the time. And I think this is a very common experience for members of the overseas Chinese community or people who are living outside of China but have connections to China at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It felt like we were living in two timelines at the same time, right? On one hand, we were observing what is happening in our home country and feels like that as we are looking into the future. On the other hand, we also feel that in our surroundings the people, the neighbors may still feel quite oblivious and to them the virus still feels very far away. Christian, I understand you’re in the US at the time in Colorado, right? What was your experience like as someone who is an American living in the US at the time but also a scholar of China and probably observing what is happening in China quite closely?

Christian Sorace: Well, you know, this conversation just reminded me that possibly my first experience of COVID was somewhat unbeknownst to me and at the bodily level. I was actually in China. I was in Inner Mongolia at the end of December, 2019 and then early 2020 in January, I was on a trip that went from Beijing to Shenzhen and then to Hong Kong. And I actually just kind of, you know, occurred to me I had one of the worst respiratory infections I’ve ever had in my life during that trip. And then I went back to the US and I actually went to, cause at the time news was starting to come out and I went to the doctors and I was like, maybe I had COVID and they’re like, no, don’t be ridiculous. And you know, you’re fine and don’t worry about it even if you did and so on. So who knows, maybe I was patient zero, God forbid, but in terms of coming back to the US. But really the experience was also, as Jing said, it was extraordinarily surreal to be teaching. I have lots of students from China. I think, I don’t remember if I was teaching Chinese politics or something else at the time, but I just remember watching, you know, what was happening and then that weird sense of both temporal and spatial delay and, you know, also diffusion of how it was spreading and when and classes then, you know, are they gonna go on or be canceled? And at that time it was up until the last minute, actually I was planning to take a study abroad group of students to Yunnan. And we were like holding out watching, you know, until we realized that it would be impossible. And then I guess some of the other, you know, memories from that time, like, you know, from personal ones of just that like hyper awareness of surfaces of air, of our interdependencies, of like the feeling you get in your body when somebody coughs in the next aisle in the supermarket and you’re just hyper aware of these proximities. And, you know, at the time in 2020, my son was just around one. And I think it really amplified that experience of being a parent where you feel both, you know, absolutely capable of anything and then extraordinarily powerless, right? And so I felt in that moment, like all of that just kind of amplified those feelings of how are we going to get through this and take care of the people, you know, that we love as well as the people that we share space with, you know, the intimacy of strangers.

Yangyang Cheng: Yeah, actually just on this point, I feel on one hand on Christian as you said, I have so much respect for caregivers. I feel that I could barely take care of myself on five years ago or at any point for that matter. On the other hand, I feel one thing about the Chinese person living in the US at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was in some ways, sinophobia spread faster than the virus. And I think it was when I moved to the US, I became aware as a racialized person, but I had never felt as keenly aware of the body I inhabit than like five years ago at the start of the pandemic, both because of the spread of the virus and also because of this racialized existence and this fear and in some ways, very explicit hostility towards people who look Chinese. And Jean, how did you feel about that time since you were living in China, but you also have family in the US and students?

Jing Wang: Yeah, I feel you exactly in the sense that you describe, it made us hyper aware of the body we inhabit and what kind of implication it means when we move around in the different world we inhabit, right? So at the time while I was living in China, actually under lockdown for, I think almost three, four months, just about the same length as the Wuhan lockdown, which was 76 days. After Wuhan lockdown was lifted, many other lockdowns across China was also lifted. So I sort of went through that parallel timeline. But if we come back to the emergence or the rapid rise of xenophobia, as well as I have to say anti-Asian hate, not just in the United States, but across many other countries in Europe, as well as I remember in India and the Middle East as well, it makes me sort of very sad, but also interesting, not surprised, because I do study politics of race and ethnicity in the Chinese context, but also globally through lived experience as well as media representations. So one thing, if we remember going back to the SARS outbreak in the early 2000, similar things happened, of the rise of xenophobia and anti-Asian hate at the time. There was few news reports about it at the time. The reason why I knew about it was when the COVID just broke out, my friend, Lily, who is in Germany and me inside of China, we noticed a similar thing of this really racist comment of this Chinese woman, travel blogger, whose picture got widely circulated on the internet. And the picture was about this woman eating bat soup, in a seemingly Chinese restaurant, but it turned out that it’s actually fake news. It’s sort of misinformation. The woman, the travel blogger who had the bat soup was actually in Palau, I remember, in Indonesia, but that kind of caught popularity on the internet worldwide when the COVID broke out and people sort of accused Chinese people of eating things like bats or having really unhygienic practices that led to the potential outbreak of virus. So my friend and I started documenting those cases sort of like on an online archive and we call it xenophobia tracker as part of the efforts to remember what we went through together.

Yangyang Cheng: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. So Christian, as a political scientist, and I believe you are observing these kinds of interactions were not just coming from the public, but a lot of these really hostile rhetoric were also coming from the highest levels of both governments in Beijing and in Washington who are trying to use their response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to prove their political superiority and to accuse the other government. And if we stay within the 2020 timeframe, can you give us like a quick summary of how these two governments were reacting and how they were trying to appropriate the pandemic for their own political interests?

Christian Sorace: Yeah, by the way, at Colorado College, where I was teaching at the time, there were several workshops, especially led by students dealing with the histories of anti-Asian hate, of xenophobia, of racism, of also thinking about the kind of interlocking histories of colonialism and immunology and unevenly distributed vulnerabilities. And so there was a lot of really interesting stuff that students and faculty that we were all doing, I think collaboratively and several students and it made sense of mine who were from China for those very reasons, went back to China because they said they would feel both safer from the virus there and safer from the endemic racism that was flaring up at the time in the US. In terms of the political responses, I focused more on China’s response, which was really kind of making a biopolitical argument for its own legitimacy, right? Like we are, part of my work is I pay a lot of attention to what the Communist Party says about itself and the kinds of language it uses to legitimate itself, right? So really the language that started to come out was that we are putting life first. We’re putting life as our main priority. It’s more important than the economy. It’s more important than other things. We will use all of the efforts of state power to not spare one single patient, right? And that became the underlying rationale for the idea of like the dynamic zero COVID, like zero deaths or zero preventable deaths due to COVID. Now, the problem obviously is that not with that inherently, but how that then becomes basically tethered to than the state kind of legitimation and how claims are made on that behalf, right? So, I mean, the Chinese government was looking at what was happening in the U.S., the massive amounts of death, the seemingly insouison attitude of Trump during his first reign and basically saying we care for our population and you don’t, right? And it was a simple kind of argument. And in some ways, especially up until if we think about, up until Omicron and the heavy period of lockdowns, it was a compelling argument for many. But right, the danger of that too, there’s a lot of dangers of that. And it means that, you know, on the other hand, it might become less about the care and wellbeing and protection of its own population and then more about protecting its own kind of legitimating claims, right? And the question is when does it cross that threshold, right? Or when does the bio, when does care become carceral would be another way to put it.

Yangyang Cheng: That is a really great way to put it, right? Like when does care become carceral? And I think one of the things is it is a wrestling of power, but even an authoritarian state as powerful as the Chinese regime does not have control over the natural evolution of a virus, right? And so the narrative was constantly being rewritten because the pandemic and the virus underlying it was evolving. However, Christian, as you mentioned, right? For much of like the late 2020 to much of 2021, the Chinese government’s narrative that it was winning this war against the disease was quite convincing and it was doing a better job than a lot of Western governments. And even like my mother who lives in China was quite grateful to Xi Jinping and to the Chinese government and she felt very proud to be Chinese at the time. But then as you mentioned, up until the point when Omicron emerged at the end of 2021 and to 2022, this zero COVID strategy became, took on a very, very different scale and in terms of the interventions to people’s lives. And Jean, I know that during that time, you have moved back to the US. And so what was that experience like when you were physically in the US now, but then watching these most stringent waves of zero COVID lockdowns during 2022 at the height of the Omicron wave?

Jing Wang: Yeah, well, first of all, I would just say your mom’s observations and feelings are certainly not alone. Actually, many people share that feeling within China and outside of China, in the Chinese diasporic communities as well. And for me personally, I actually spent quite some time traveling across China from about May 2020 to the end of 2020 for doing some follow-up field work. So I observed quite a similar trends like your mom might describe to you. Lockdowns were being lifted, although a lot of restrictions remained in place while becoming less stringent. And social life sort of resumed. People walked around, went to shopping malls, going to the markets, put their kids back to school while some are still going online. And I was teaching in NYU Shanghai at the time. So I remember very clearly that’s actually the first time I taught a hybrid class. Half of my class, the students, they were in China while about half of the students, they were trapped sort of in different countries outside of China and they couldn’t make it back. And it took them quite some time for individual students to come back. So you would observe in just a small class with maybe 15, 16 students, like eight people came into China at different timelines depending on what flights they would be able to book at that time. And by the end of 2020, I finally got a visa to the US after dozens of cancellation of my visa appointments and sort of reunited with my partner. Then it’s interesting, our parents became very, very worried about us living in the US throughout much of the 2021 because they thought the Chinese government did a much better job like Christian was describing biopolitics wise. They were using the narrative of saving every life at the expense of say economic costs and stuff like that.

Yangyang Cheng: I really appreciate that both of you have these transnational perspectives that you were actually moving across these borders. Both national borders and geopolitical borders during the first year of the pandemic. I was sitting in my room in Chicago the entire first 18 months. I think I only left my apartment like half a dozen times. And so while we get to this point, I would like to unpack some of the more specific aspects of how the Chinese government implemented or exercised this control over the population to implement and enforce the zero COVID lockdowns. And I know that several scholars have noticed some of these sights and sounds from the COVID-19 zero COVID lockdowns reminded them of the Mao era mass mobilizations. And even some of the very symbolic things like the use of loud speakers to demand people to stay at home or there are people wearing these red armbands standing guard outside residential communities. And like the sociologist Yang Guobin also made some of these observations including his book, The Wuhan Lockdown, that some of these mass mobilizations also took on a warlike character. And some of these old techniques also took on some new appearances. Like here, our listeners can hear a short clip from a very famous little high tech buddy from the Shanghai lockdown three years ago in the spring of 2022. (Chinese Audio Part)

Yangyang Cheng: And so here, this drone is telling the residents of Shanghai to resist their spirits yearning for freedom and don’t sing at their balconies. And this clip actually cracks me up because this drone actually sounds a lot like my mother who was my elementary school Chinese teacher as well. And so, Jin as an anthropologist and also a media scholar, you have actually studied the soundscapes of the COVID lockdowns very extensively and you’ve written about that for the Made in China journal and places. So tell us about some of your observations. Like how do the authorities use sound to achieve social control and how did the people respond to them?

Jing Wang: So I think it’s a fascinating thing when we think of embodied experiences during COVID-19 like we just chatted about. And sound is one of them. And sound can be so many different things. It could be a side of control from the government perspective, but it also could be a side of protest of healing and even having fun as many people have been exercising them. In my work, I try to show some of those complexities by looking at different soundscapes. On the one hand, if we look at a sound as control, because sound is such an embodied experience, it is something that if we imagine comparing it with the visuality, then during COVID-19, a lot of things are actually hidden from the sites. And a lot of things are becoming anonymized in the image of say, big whites, or people dressed in the PPEs. A lot of them might be medical staff or government workers or community volunteers, but they all become indistinguishable in that white suit. And the visuality really blocked people’s ability to access many things. And at that time, so sound became part of this mechanism of control because it’s really pervasive. The government workers or the volunteers did not only go to people’s houses, they also use loudspeakers to blare sounds, urging people to take the nuclear assets tests or stay at home, don’t come out. There might be consequences. And I remember talking to friends and the families and asking them feelings about their feelings reacting to hearing those sounds really early or very late at night. And many of them would mention it really disturbed their sleep. They developed insomnia and that sense of lingering fatigue continues, even after COVID officially so-called ended. And Yangyang, you also played the clip of this drone carrying loudspeakers over the high-rise residential areas in Shanghai at night. I thought that’s also a symbol of how media technology have been incorporated into this complex sound escape to exert social control from the government perspective, and not just drones. In fact, on the social media images of robot dogs carrying loudspeakers, like walking in the residential area with virtually no people and shouting stay at home, stay hygienic, wearing masks. So those sounds could be considered as a mechanism of control during the pandemic. But like I said, sound could also be sites of resistance. It could be sites of joy-making. And if we think back, one of really famous sound fighters called the Sound of April during the Shanghai lockdown in 2020. And the editor and producer is someone called Gary. That’s sort of a pseudonym. And this sound bite, a collage of different sound made by residents in Shanghai. It could be mothers crying out help for getting medicine for her children because they were in the lockdown and couldn’t access it, or some other collateral damage made during the pandemic, not visually available, but sort of sonically audible to the audiences became super powerful because of the heavy mechanism of control, placed either offline or online. And people relayed that Sound of April in different formats and keep it alive. And like sociologist Yang Guo-bin argued, relay is also a creative form of resistance during the pandemic. And the other part of, if we can think of sound as resistance is heckling. If we remember back even in the Wuhan lockdown, when the vice premier, Sun Quanlin went to Wuhan and visited the city, the residents that were under lockdown in their apartments shouted from their windows. It’s all fake. Whatever the government says, they would deliver the food, the necessities in time. They actually didn’t fulfill that promise. So the residents used that shouting and noises from their windows as a form of sonic protest.

Yangyang Cheng: Yeah, I remember that scene of that protest from the balconies really well. And it felt like it’s a remarkable display of courage, but I also feel it was conditioned by the sense of both proximity, but also distance and anonymity because of the lockdown environment and with these high rise buildings. And you mentioned Siyue Zhisheng, the Sound of April, this iconic, I think it should be called this way, now’s compilation of sounds from the Shanghai lockdown from the spring of 2022. And I would encourage listeners to listen to the full six minutes clip, but I believe we do have a short clip from it. (Chinese Audio Clip)

Yangyang Cheng: In this 20 second clip, our shouts from the residents under lockdown about supplies being dispatched. And then we also hear a neighborhood committee official who was in tears saying that she also felt helpless and exhausted and she wished for better policies, but she had to abide by orders from above. And so Christian, coming to you, you also noted in your writings that there are echoes of the Chinese party states, revolutionary past, right? These references to militant or militaristic language, like this is a people’s war against the virus. However, you also point out there are important differences between the past and the present between this class-based revolutionary mass politics in the Mao era, like during the Cultural Revolution and the present day technocratic or you mentioned biopolitical governance. And that is much more centralized. For example, what we heard from the clip from this Shanghai residential committee official who felt that she was helpless because she had to abide by policies from above. So can you unpack some of that? What are the similarities and differences in the present day COVID-19 lockdowns in terms of mass mobilization and technocratic governance compared with the communist party’s revolutionary past?

Christian Sorace: It is always important, when we think about China to do that work of thinking about continuities, discontinuities, what kinds of historical comparisons or analogies that we use to help us get a handle on things. When are they illuminating? When do they actually confuse things or obscure them more? And so I think it’s a really wonderful set of questions. And what I want to say about the Mao period, I think you already said best that the politics, the ideology, the view of the world, the mobilization of the masses in politics are much different than the kinds of politics, concepts and world that’s being constructed under Xi Jinping. And I think that at least for me is something that I always try to reiterate in whatever chance I get. Now, of course, when we start to look granularly, right? There are lots of continuities, for instance, right? This whole epidemiological regime can’t just kind of emerge from thin air, right? So if we think of how is zero COVID even possible, it takes root in those smaller units of urban grid management of communities, of residential communities, of the kind of cellular spatial politics that goes all the way back, right? That has changed and evolved over time, but that goes all the way back to the Mao period, right? So even if we think like how asking that question, right? How is zero COVID, how is this apparatus even built? We need to think about the kind of spatial administrative, right? Politics and there’s a history there, right? So when we look at the biopolitics and the discourses, this is one kind of continuity and discontinuity where it’s actually, when the party says life first, they usually say like renmin sheng, you know, renmin shengming, like the people’s life, right? So it’s not just the category of life or individual life, but the political category of the people, right? Is also being evoked and mobilized. And the people has in that both Maoist and also Schmidian way that kind of us versus them dichotomy. And so that’s also there and operative and something that we should pay attention to. But what I really think one of the, at least kind of more recent history that resonated or that I saw somewhat being replayed discursively during the COVID-19 pandemic was related to my, the work that I did for my PhD and my first book on the Sichuan earthquake was in the aftermath of the earthquake, the discourse there of legitimation was the party, you know, it was that this is a natural disaster. This is not a manmade catastrophe. The party’s interventions give life or give new life. And then that creates a specific, right, state society or state subject relationship where what is expected is gratitude, right? So in a much more kind of maybe contentious setting, sometimes in some of the areas in the post earthquake reconstruction disaster zones, where when people were not displaying the appropriate kinds of let’s say deference or gratitude or compliance, the communist party launched gratitude education campaigns, right? And so I’ve started to really pay attention to the way gratitude can be actually continually kind of demanded as a mode of political, demanding kind of political compliance, right? And a paternalistic relationship between the state and society.

Yangyang Cheng: And so thank you so much, Christian, for sharing with us and unpacking these differences and similar, like the changes and continuities as a historian would say, in terms of how the Chinese communist party responds to different historic moments and how to utilize that to enforce its own legitimacy and how it is important that one does not over apply historical analogies. And the one thing is, however, the state tries to impose control. It’s limited in its power, especially in a dynamic situation like a pandemic. And this draconian zero COVID lockdowns eventually proved unsustainable and the people rebelled. And most notably at the end of 2022 with the white paper movement and its name came up because a lot of the protesters held up a blank sheet of paper as a symbol of resistance against state censorship. However, before we get to that moment at the end of 2022, I would like to come to Jing. As in your work, you also observe a lot of these before people take it to the streets. They also embody, quote unquote, everyday resistance in how they live and how they express themselves. Could you tell us a bit of that?

Jing Wang: Of course. For example, in the essay I wrote for Made in China, I primarily focus on the sound for healing and fun, actually. I listened to many podcasts and sort of conceptualized them as pandemic sound diaries because diaries are usually personal, but sound diaries during COVID are both personal and social because people would talk to each other and there are listeners to those podcasts as well. And those sounds are being used for everyday resistance, but primarily through conversations, through healing for each other and through making fun or what Chinese would call making fun out of bitterness, like 苦中作乐. I’ll give a few examples. So I remember I listened to a few podcasts where college students, they did sort of monologues really in the diary form, talking about their lockdown experiences on campus, in their dorms. You could hear it was actually quite silent from their room and they were kind of talking into the air, but finding a sense of solace from the listeners who commented on their podcasts. And there are also friends talking about food delivery and a mutual aid in their own neighborhood, in the podcast as well. And some really prominent example are how people talking about the loudspeakers, some would even record the sounds from the loudspeakers in their streets or in their residential communities and sort of commented on that and making fun out of it as well. So I would say in general, this kind of sound for healing and fun becomes a survival technique itself.

Yangyang Cheng: Thank you. But eventually the people did take it to the streets and I should mention this that before the white paper protests, some of the earliest embodied protests were coming from migrant workers, most notably from the workers at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, which is the world’s largest iPhone plant. And then later on in late November, after a fire in a lockdown building in downtown Urumqi, which is the capital of the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang, broke out and claimed at least 10 lives. And I should also note here are, as far as we know, are Uyghur lives and the people across China took it to the streets to protest these lockdowns. Christian, for Made in China Journal, you wrote a really powerful article co-written with Nicholas LeBrouille about the biopolitical binaries or how not to read the anti-zero COVID lockdown protests. Can you unpack some of that for us? What do you mean by this false binary that a lot of the Western narratives about the end of zero COVID protests in China were taking place? And what is the right way to read it?

Christian Sorace: I think what prompted it was, at that time when I was driving to work in Colorado on my way to the office, there were parents outside of elementary schools, holding up protest signs like anti-vaccine, anti-mask, basically anti-state biopolitics measures. And of course they were reprising language from feminist discourse and pro-choice discourse. And they were holding signs like my body, my rights, state, get your hands off my body or things like that. And so I really, Nicholas and I were talking about how this moment is a question of what is the role of the state in promoting, in intervening, in structuring public health, right? How can the state be used for a positive biopolitics in a way that’s potentially more democratic than it is autocratic, right? But nevertheless, what we started to see was this framing, what we call the biopolitical binary of this idea of either a kind of despotic state power on the one hand or then the assertion of the rights of the sovereignty of the bodily integrity of the liberal individual on the other hand or the way in which, as the political theorist Libby Anker puts it, those liberal freedoms were being pursued as quote, she calls it ugly freedoms, as the kind of insistence on being able to do whatever one wants regardless of its impact on others, to kind of be free of responsibility and care for others. And so what Nicholas and I saw were people responding in these kinds of more conservative or libertarian anti-state circles in North America, like the Canadian trucker convoys and all of that, we’re basically voicing solidarity with the A4 protesters in China and saying, you see, they also want the state off of their backs, right? And so we, just like them, with China then standing in, in a very overly determined orientalist and racist fashion, China stands in as the epitome of an authoritarian state and as a biopolitical kind of despotism, right? And so what we’re kind of trying to say, okay, pulling back everything we’ve already discussed on this podcast, the complexities of people feeling cared for by the state, of people feeling imprisoned by the state, of people feeling ambivalent toward the state, right? Of all of those different kinds of experiences at different points in time in China and ways of thinking about like, so how do we, right? If the pandemic confronts us with that question of we are interdependent and living together, but as you rightfully put it, experiencing things in very different uneven ways through different gendered and racialized modes of embodiment and so forth. But nevertheless, when we breathe the same air, that upends a simplistic way of thinking, well, my right begins here and ends there, right? It’s much more interdependent. And so Nicholas and I just wanted to, one, point to the kind of complexity of state society dynamics in China, but two, say that this framing of state power vis-a-vis the individual is not really a helpful way of thinking about the multiple crises that actually place us in common.

Yangyang Cheng: Yeah, I think, thank you so much for sharing the beautiful thoughts. I think one of the most visceral senses of living through a pandemic is how like bodies, whether it’s an individual physical body or a national body or a body politic are all porous, right? And we exist in community and in and with each other. And I remember one of the authors that I read a lot during the first two years of the pandemic was Judith Butler. And I was reading about how like to live in this world is to be undone by each other. And then I was really taken by their concept of a grievable life, like what count as a life and what kind of life is a grievable life. And then I think on Christian as what you mentioned, right? This biopolitical approach from the Chinese government as a way to appropriate a narrative of value in life as a way to enhance and monopolize its state power, including its power of violence on one hand or the necropolitical approach of some of the Western governments. And to say this is just happening and some lives are just going to be somewhat lost and both are ways to deem certain groups of people and certain lives disposable. And Jean, I would like to come back to you and come to this point about living through loss and about grief. As an anthropologist and as a media scholar, what were some of your thinkings and some of your observations through this process? How does an individual Chinese person facing a virus on one hand and state power on the other, how do they contend with their own power and powerlessness and how do they approach and navigate their grief?

Jing Wang: Wow, what a powerful question. I truly wish I could have read more Butler during the pandemic, but I didn’t. However, one person I did read more during that time was Hannah Arendt. And one inspiration she gave me was that we must keep thinking and reflecting on our own situations, our own lives, despite whatever the circumstances are. And it’s also very dangerous that when life is reduced to bare existence, our critical thinking stops, which might lead to more disasters, both in personal lives and in collective lives, both in China and in the United States, as we have been observing again and again. And coming back to your question about how ordinary Chinese people sort of deal with those situations, particularly for mourning and grief, I think the most prominent case that stands out for me is a virtual wailing wall of Dr. Li Wenliang on the social media of Weibo. And I think many Chinese people really resonate with Dr. Li on many levels. First of all, he is, for our listeners, Dr. Li Wenliang is one of the early whistleblowers in the early period of COVID-19. And in his Weibo account, you could see the post he did when he was alive. And in those posts, he is really fun, an ordinary person, very humorous, loves little joys in life, really enjoys food. He lives in Wuhan, but he never thought of himself as a protester to start with. He thought he is an ordinary citizen, a professional doctor who wanted his family, his patients, his colleagues to stay safe. When something like SARS, similar to SARS, might broke out in Wuhan back then. And yet, when he tried to warn his close circles in social media like WeChat, he was warned by the authorities, by the police. And later, he himself also got infected and he died a really painful death. So both his personality and his experience deeply resonated with the ordinary Chinese people during the COVID-19 and after, because we see ourselves in his own life, in his personality. People didn’t start at once to be a martyr, a sacrifice, a protester, but things happen. And he did courageously what he thought he was supposed to do, and then lived through that consequence and died. So when people saw he was in ICU during critical condition and after he passed away, a lot of people just swarmed into his Weibo account and kind of mourned his past. And they left a lot of messages for him even after he passed away. Now, more than five years have passed, people still would leave messages in his account, that’s why people call it the wailing wall of COVID. They would tell Dr. Li what happened to them, whether it’s related to COVID or not related, and they would remember him year after year. So I would see his death and the virtual space he left on social media really become a site of haunting, if you will, for those lingering pain, those lingering memories and traumas, but also people sort of treated as a site for hope as well.

Yangyang Cheng: A site of haunting and a site for hope. Thank you so much, Jing. And I think Dr. Li’s Weibo account and a comment section in particular is really a really poignant note to bring us to this present moment five years on of how much has been lost, but how much is still being remembered and how people are still grieving their griefs in their own ways. And I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that part of me cannot believe it’s been five years, it feels both like yesterday and a lifetime ago. And that’s how it feels, on one hand, it feels like the world has moved on, the governments have lifted the restrictions, and there is a certain reluctance to talk about it among the public, partly as a way to process trauma, but partly for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, this moment in early 2025, as we are recording this episode in April of 2025, also gives me an intense sense of deja vu. Like it feels like five years ago, even though the underlying causes are very different, it’s still a moment of great uncertainty. It’s a moment of a lot of fear, a lot of terrible things are happening. And there is a sense of helplessness, but also a sense of community, one is not alone, a lot of people are dealing with this. So Christian, I would like to come to you. What do lessons from COVID-19 inform us today? Because I feel there are still a lot of lessons that are unlearned, or had we learned it better, I remember what Arundhati Roy wrote five years ago, the pandemic is a portal, and now we are at some way, the other side of the portal, but have not necessarily emerged as a better world. As a political scientist and China scholar, what are some of the lessons that should have been learned, or we can still learn at this moment?

Christian Sorace: I’m really happy that you chose this topic for this inaugural podcast for Made in China, because I think that we really have to actually work hard to keep open that space of not only memory and mourning, but also reflection and critical work and elaboration, of precisely as you asked, what are the lessons that we can learn, or maybe if I can put it slightly differently, what are the questions that we can ask better, or what kinds of questions emerge from COVID, rather than suggest that I have a set of answers. In the Chinese case, I think maybe I would love to hear what both or either of you think. We do have to take note that from this insistence of zero COVID life above everything else, not one patient’s life will be spared, and there was talk underway because of the economic effects of zero COVID, so of dismantling it, correct? So that was being, I think, at least slowly considered and thought through, and then the A4 protests really catalyze and shake up in a certain way the party leadership, and then shortly after, zero COVID is done, and millions, I don’t know what the statistics, I’m very bad with statistics, are, but massive amounts of people die. So where is the symbolic space to, and I guess Jing, as you pointed out, the virtual wailing wall, but where is the symbolic space to mourn them if the official discourse of life first basically kind of hits this precipice and then disappears? Right, so that’s something that really troubles me, and I have no idea how to answer that. And then I think in places like the US and the UK, I think there’s such an overwhelming desire right now to obliterate any space for questioning, reflection, mourning, or thinking about those sets of senses and sensibilities that of different possibilities of living together, of caring for each other, of stopping the kind of environmentally suicidal growth machine of the economy and putting other values first, right? Or I guess, you know, Andreas Maum, right, in his, you know, very provocative book where he calls, you know, for eco-Leninism. But, you know, he says, like, hey, if we could, if states did the unthinkable during COVID and actually kind of put the economy to suspend the ordinary function of capitalism, why couldn’t we do it for climate change? Why couldn’t we do it to build a different kind of world, however we want to harness those kinds of political powers? So I think that all of those questions, there’s no space or stomach or appetite for them.

Yangyang Cheng: Thank you so much, Christian. Jing, I would like to give you the last word. I think for those of us who are born in China after the Mao era, sometimes it feels unimaginable that some of the political excesses like the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward during the Mao era could take place. But I think at least part of the lessons for me during COVID-19 and in the current political moment, seeing what is happening, gives me a sense of how all these were possible and are still possible. And of course, as Christian mentioned, like historical analogies have their limits and one should be careful about that. On the other hand, when the seemingly unimaginable happens, it is also an incentive for us to broaden our moral and political imagination. So Jing, how are you feeling at this moment? What sounds and stories are you paying attention to to navigate this present moment?

Jing Wang: Thank you, Yanyang, for bringing us back to the current moment. And one thing I really resonate with, which you said and what Christian said was, I think we need to be extremely cautious of the lessons we learned from the past, but also keep asking the critical questions we need to ask in order to move forward. As for feelings at this moment, I have to say I felt similar as what you just said, a sense of deja vu. Well, in a terribly ironic sense, you know, because COVID was a prolonged moment of isolation, not just for me, but for so many people around the world. It’s literally what we could call a state of emergency, you know, according to the political theory. And we have been in the survival mode for quite a few years, no matter it’s in the US, in China, or in other parts of the world. Then you would expect things, you know, to become a little better at coming out after that COVID years, but not really. Now living in the US is also like living through constant states of the emergency day after day. While those events might seem different in terms of their appearance, they all make people feel frightened, depressed, and isolated in a world scale. So I would say I definitely share those sentiments and the feelings with so many of my friends, my colleagues, my students, and beloved ones. But I would also say I actually see a lot of hope, just like, you know, in the way that I described the virtual wailing wall of Dr. Li Wenliang, because you know, from there, people don’t forget. They will remember. It’s just, you know, they will remember it in different ways, either within their family, in their own diaries, or, you know, in social media, or in their later lives. And also I want to point out the resilience of ordinary people, because time and again, no matter if it’s in liberal states, no matter if it’s in, you know, authoritarian regimes, or from a longer-durée perspective, it’s always the ordinary people who have the uttermost strength to live through things. So in that sense, I might be a pessimist in the short term, but I think I’m an optimist in the long term.

And for the things that I am reflecting on right now—well, in personal life, I still quite enjoy listening to a lot of podcasts, but I’m trying to listen to sounds in nature a little bit more. If you guys are interested, I highly recommend, you know, going out and enjoy yourself while the world is crumbling down, but I think we need to find strength wherever and whenever we can.

Yangyang Cheng: Thank you so much. I think one of the sentences I’ve been reminding myself most often over the past five years is from the American activist Mariame Kaba, who said, “Hope is discipline.” And it’s something that I try to exercise myself as well. So Dr. Jing Wang, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jing Wang: Thank you so much. I really feel honored to be in the inaugural episode and, you know, share all those experiences with you and with Christian. It has been a most enriching journey.

Yangyang Cheng: And Dr. Christian Sorace—not the hot sauce, but giving us hot thoughts—thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Christian Sorace: Thank you for inviting and hosting and your wonderful questions. And also thank you, Jing, for all of your brilliant thoughts and work as well.

Jing Wang: Thank you so much to both of you.

Yangyang Cheng: You can find writings from both Jing and Christian in the Made in China Journal. We’ll put a link to them in the show notes, as well as the links to the clips, such as Sound of April, that you just heard from. Thank you so much for listening, I’m your host, Yangyang Cheng, our producer is Tommaso Facchin and our editorial assistant is Arthur Kaufmann. Special thanks to Ryan McEvoy at the Yale Broadcast Studio. You can find our show on the websites for the Made in China Journal and the Global China Lab, as well as on all major podcast platforms. Stay tuned for the next episode of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China. See you next month!