Biopolitics in China: An Introduction

The idea of biopolitics has proved one of the most generative in social studies of medicine and science, yet until recently it is an idea most readily deployed in relation to the history of Western Europe and the northern, developed nations. This is unsurprising, given that, in Foucault’s historical account of biopower, its emergence as a form of politics in the nineteenth century is intimately bound up with the formation of modern, Western European nation-states and the constitution of their national populations (Foucault 1978). In this account, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Western European states begin to address their populations as embodied beings in order to improve physical productivity and discipline in the interests of capital formation and military prowess. They begin to regulate and optimize population processes—the life processes of fertility, birth, health, sexuality, morbidity, and life span—drawing on the new biomedical and statistical sciences of the nineteenth century to provide administrative traction on the citizen’s body. Biopolitics deals with such phenomena as mortality and fertility that are unpredictable at an individual level but that have certain kinds of regularity at a collective level, and that are susceptible to collective, regulatory modification—the lowering of the birth rate, the increase in overall fertility, improvement in morbidity rates, and so on. Above all, Foucault states, biopolitics is addressed to the securing of an optimal biological stability in populations “to compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field . . . to optimize a state of life” (2003: 246).

The usefulness of biopolitics as an analytic concept has, however, extended beyond its original historical and geopolitical location. It has proved to be a durable and flexible provocation, generating critical insights into the relations among states, populations, scientific knowledge, and administrative practice in other historical trajectories and social locations. As Mei Zhan points out in her article in this volume (“Human Oriented? Angels and Monsters in China’s Health-Care Reform”), the idea of biopolitics has become a method, a way to approach particular empirical fields and historical complexities, rather than a normative account of national development. At the same time, exposure to the dense texture of other, non-European histories continually opens out and enriches the idea of biopolitics and alerts us to the manifold ways that life and power can be entangled.

Of particular interest to the readers of EASTS, a growing body of scholarship considers the ways that the particular trajectories of East Asian history, politics, and science intersect with different regional models of health, longevity, reproduction, gender, and so forth, and different ways in which populations have been mobilized to support or contest nation-building through biomedical development. Such mobilization takes place in the context of an increasingly globalized knowledge market where the competition for control of the future bioeconomy generates its own particular forms of biopolitics. States with global economic and political ambition in the biomedical future are obliged to engage with the international character of biomedical innovation. As they do so, the nature of their internal biopolitics is inevitably shaped by the requirements of successful global competition. At the same time, such biopolitical adaptations are always likely to be constrained by the imperatives embedded in the domestic political structures.

Given this context, in this special issue, we bring together four essays that consider the ways that biopolitical relations play out in contemporary China. One of the distinctive features of recent biopolitical studies (e.g., Sunder Rajan 2006; Cooper 2007; Rose 2007) has been a concern with the ways that market logics now inform and organize both laboratory life and the life of populations. China gives us perhaps the most dramatic case of state-directed transition from a socialist, command economy to an experimental, innovation-driven economy, and hence opens up new ways to understand the possible relations between health, medicine, markets, and politics.

The contributions from Zhan and from Melinda Cooper (“Experimental Republic: Medical Accidents [Productive and Unproductive] in Postsocialist China”) focus our attention on the biopolitics of the postsocialist hospital, examining the social conflicts over hospital care and the doctor–patient relationship generated by...