Affective Lockdown: Administrative Chaos and Informal Repairing in the Local Enactment of Immobility in Urban China

Yan Long, University of California, Berkeley
Wei Luo, Stanford University

This study investigates the installment and management of targeted lockdowns in urban China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Departing from the scholarly focus on either top-down governance mechanisms or spontaneous societal (in)compliance, it highlights the overlooked daily practices of government frontline workers in soliciting consent and collaboration from residents. Through fifty in-depth interviews with frontline workers in a Southern Chinese city, this research reveals that targeted lockdowns were not executed as smooth orchestrations of high formal state capacity. Instead, they were fraught with procedural, material, and personnel deficiencies and breakdowns, leading to administrative chaos and intensified resident disobedience in 2022. We argue that it was frontline workers’ informal affective labor—interpersonal emotional engagement and communal relationship building—that were collapsing boundaries between surveillance, service, and confinement. Such labor was critical in mitigating resistance and repairing a bureaucratic system that was struggling to maintain the neighborhood governance, teetering on the verge of collapse. These findings provide a granular reevaluation of the enforcement and eventually recession of targeted lockdowns that may continuously shape post-pandemic urban neighborhood governance.

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 Presented in Session 11. Public Health from Venereal Disease to Covid