The cost of safety during China’s COVID-19 management: state of exception and political auto-immunity

This article examines China’s zero-COVID strategy through a Foucauldian lens, analysing how the pandemic was transformed from a biological event into a political crisis that legitimised the ‘state of exception’. Situated within China's hybrid context of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ and neoliberal transition, I argue that the state mobilised a specific ‘regime of truth’ to monopolise the definition of life. By deploying what Esposito terms the immunisation, the government’s approach of ‘Life Above All’ (shengming zhishang) paradoxically protected biological existence by negating the biopolitical attributes of the population, reducing citizens to ‘bare life’. Drawing on online ethnography from the early Wuhan outbreak to the Shanghai lockdown, I analyse how residents and medical professionals navigated China’s pandemic governance through forms of Foucauldian counter-conduct. Rather than standing outside the governing regime, these practices contested how truth, risk, and obligation were defined and imposed under the zero-COVID policy. The paper therefore shows how pandemic governance became a site of ongoing negotiation over lived experience, social relations, and the terms on which life could be governed.