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Authoritarian Absorption unveils the transformation of China's pandemic response system from 1978 to 2018 through its battle against HIV/AIDS. Chinese bureaucrats, facing pressure from foreign agencies-especially those of the US and UK-and grassroots social movements, developed ways to turn epidemics into opportunities for enhancing domestic control and international stature. Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Yan Long reveals how Western liberal interventions can simultaneously bolster public health institutions and reinforce authoritarian power, a development pivotal to China's subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of groups like gay men.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgement
- Introduction: Transnational Politics of Pandemics
- Part I. Hidden Epidemics, 1978-1999
- Chapter 1: Institutional Ignorance: When the State Manufactures an Epidemic
- Chapter 2: Victims Unseen
- Chapter 3: Homosexuality Invisibility, Heterosexual Advocates
- Part II. Politicizing Epidemics, 1999-2009
- Chapter 4: inding Victims: The Rise of Biopolitical Citizenship
- Chapter 5: Biosocial Solidarity
- Chapter 6: Bureaucratic Feasting on AIDS Projects
- Chapter 7: Quantitative Participation as a Managerial Tool
- Part III. A "China Model" of Epidemics, 2009-2018
- Chapter 8: Seeing Gay Men like a Project
- Chapter 9: Erasing the Dead
- Chapter 10: A New Global Health Leader on the Rise?
- Conclusion: From AIDS to COVID-19 and Beyond
- References
About the author
Yan Long is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a political and organizational sociologist studying the interactions between globalization and authoritarian politics across empirical areas such as public health, civic action, urban development, and digital technology.
Summary
Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China's pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state's inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state's domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China's AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.
Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China's subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems.
Additional text
Why would an autocratic regime with a peasant base and a homophobic history abandon farmers who contracted HIV/AIDS through the commercial blood trade and embrace gay men who fell ill in cities? How did urban homosexuals overtake impoverished peasants in China's hierarchy of HIV/AIDS victimhood? And what do the answers tell us about the interactions of local officials, western donors, international organizations, and health activists in the Global South? Yan Long answers these questions in her painstaking study of the Chinese case, shedding new light on both epidemic politics and authoritarian survival in China and beyond. A book that's as empathetic as it is insightful.
