Pandemic, paternalism, and the (im)possibilities of citizenship in China

Abstract How did Chinese citizens imagine their political subjectivity under the zero‐COVID regime? Our patchwork netnography of social media discussions (2020–22) analyzes how China's pandemic governance generalized and intensified “biopolitical paternalism”—a mode of rule that fused security, care, and economic rationality under the figure of a protective state. Our discursive, dynamic, and diachronic approach traces how people engaged in scalar inquiries about responsibility and community, alternately embracing, enforcing, and critiquing state power while internalizing and interrogating its neoliberal logic. As the implicit social contract—trading compliance for protection—began to fray, citizens envisioned a national community of shared suffering and challenged the regime's necropolitics. These struggles reveal how biopolitical paternalism shapes citizenship imaginaries in contested, uneven ways, with implications beyond China's pandemic moment.