The Affirmative Biopolitics of Anxiety in China: Ambivalence, Marginalisation and Resistance Under the ‘Double Reduction’ Policy

ABSTRACT The ‘affirmative turn’ in Geography has generally been read positively for promoting care‐full urban governance, repairing inter‐group relations and enhancing socio‐spatial justice, while largely neglecting the biopolitics, marginalisation and resistance embedded therein. Additionally, negative(ly‐coded) emotions are often cast as the debilitating ‘other’ and excluded from the politics of the multitude. Drawing on the politics and sociality of emotions and Spinozian theory of affirmation, this paper dissects the affirmative biopolitics of parental educational anxiety and the affective regime transition in China. We conduct critical discourse analysis of policy documents and 45 in‐depth interviews surrounding the national ‘Double Reduction’ education policy, which seeks to reduce parental anxiety by limiting excessive homework and off‐campus tutoring. We argue that Double Reduction marks an ‘affirmative turn’ from the prior ‘Positive Energy’ affective regime and produces a ‘sympathising state’ in and beyond education. Yet it addresses only the surface‐level ‘effect’ of anxiety (hyper‐competition), rather than underpinning structural ‘causes’—like education inequality and declining upward mobility. It thus operates as a biopolitical project to monitor, censor and produce more (re)productive, aspirational and creative bodies amid economic slowdown, low marriage and fertility rates. Middle‐class parents largely reject the imposed ‘duty’ to feel less anxious, generating two emergent subjectivities—either intensified anxiety or managed‐chill (foxi) —a positive form of non‐performance and resistance. At the same time, this policy undermines the agency of less well‐resourced parents, while prompting resourceful families to pursue alternative, often costlier, more competitive strategies ( Juan ). This study highlights how biopolitics, marginalisation and resistance are integral to the affirmative turn in emotional governance in China and argues for including negative(ly‐coded) emotions in the analysis of the politics of the multitude. The case of educational anxiety and affective regime transition also positions education as both an apparatus of urban governance and as reshaping socio‐spatial inequality.