New Paper: “Between Cohesion and Control: Shequ Governance during China’s Zero-COVID”
Most research on China’s zero-COVID policy has focused on its relationship with the country’s political regime, ideological reasoning, policy-making logic, and self-legitimation of the Communist Party. Few studies have paid sufficient attention to how the policy was lived through in everyday life and collectively experienced on the ground.
In this Issues in Brief, Xuyi Zhao reflects on her 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chengdu — a southwestern Chinese metropolis with over 21 million permanent residents — from August 2021 to October 2022. Based on her work with local civil servants, community workers, and residents from different social backgrounds, she explores how China’s draconian zero-COVID policy was made possible on a daily basis, and what implications this top-down initiative engendered for urban governance and community building in urban China. She presents “the Community” (shequ) as a dynamic interface between the state and the individual citizens that often oscillates between the paradoxical aspects of social cohesion and political control.
Xuyi Zhao is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology broadly interested in urbanization, migration, gender, and the state. Zhao holds a BA in political science from Peking University and an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Cambridge. Her current research investigates state-engineered urbanization in southwest China at the intersection of time, politics, and urban imagination. She was a 2023 Graduate Summer Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.