From sovereignty to governmentality and back: China and the USA.

Abstract

Maoist China (1949–1979) represented what Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben meant by ‘sovereign power’, par excellence. A single sacred personage exercised personal decisionism that overrode institutional procedures. The sovereign nation’s borders were sealed against imperialist incursions, capitalist trade or human travel and migration. The rhetoric of class struggle (class was inherited from fathers), war and revolutionary martyrdom, and the catastrophic loss of human life through state indifference in the famine of 1959–61 (30–50 million excess deaths), the Cultural Revolution (10 million), etc., resonated with Foucault’s description of monarchical power: a focus on blood, kinship, war and death. During the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, the Chinese government was secretive and refused foreign aid. However, there was no need to declare a ‘state of exception’, for Maoist China possessed few laws, hence, no need to suspend them. In post‐Mao China, at first it seemed that the Chinese government cover‐up of the Wuhan coronavirus in January, and the disciplining of Dr Li Wenliang, the whistleblower who dared to publicise the virus, were a throwback to Maoist sovereignty. However, the difficult decision to shut down an already faltering Chinese economy, the dedicated medical care and the eventual success in lowering the curve of casualties, reveal significant shifts towards governmentality in recent decades. In 2020, although the state still hounds its critics and controls all media, it also shared epidemic details in January with the American CDC, and eventually placed the health and welfare of the population above consideration of ‘face’ for the sovereign. Meanwhile, the coronavirus reveals an opposite movement for the USA, once a beacon of democracy and globalisation. After years of the steady deterioration of the healthcare system, the welfare state, environmental protections, and the expansion of the homeless population, the coronavirus exposes the rapid decline of an American governmentality that had promoted life. The firing of Navy Captain Brett Crozier, who tried to save his crew, was the Li Wenliang moment for the U.S. The Trump administration’s disregard for scientific forecasts of coronavirus devastation, and its refusal to formulate a unified Federal plan to protect the nation, bespeak a biopolitics of indifference to preserving lives. In the words of Foucault, we are seeing a shift from “a power to foster life” to one that “disallow[s] it to the point of death” (1978:138).1 Trump’s reluctance to invest in virus test kits, ventilators and face masks, or to call for or maintain lockdowns, suggest that securing the existing system of capitalist corporations, oligarchs, profits, and his re‐ election are higher priorities. The ideologies of Neoliberalism, Libertarianism, gun rights, Right‐wing Christianity, and rhetoric of the ‘deep state’ seem more worthy