Citizens’ strategic responses to affective governance in China

Abstract

Previous studies on affective governance (情感治理) emphasize how the state has regulated and manipulated citizens’ emotions and psychology. This article, however, shows a different political landscape in which citizens employ emotional strategies to persuade and bargain with the government. Drawing on intensive fieldwork conducted in China from 2019 to 2020, we find that citizens deploy targeted emotional strategies to advance specific interests such as building reciprocal relations with the government, arousing political elites’ empathy, or addressing their most urgent needs. We argue that the government’s deliberate use of affective governance has, on the one hand, unexpectedly revealed and reinforced the conflict between the positive emotions that the state has attempted to exhibit and citizens’ daily experiences and, on the other hand, increased positive feelings towards the government’s efficacy in addressing citizens’ grievances. Taking rare disease patient groups as an example, this article maps and compares three main emotional strategies adopted by civil society in China, namely gratefulness, sadfishing, and dissent. By deciphering these emotional strategies, this article helps us understand the emotional synergy between state and society and sheds new light on the governance of China.