Health packages and affective infrastructures: promises of (Im)mobility in pandemic times

Abstract

ABSTRACT In spring 2020, during the peak of the first wave of the coronavirus outbreak across Europe, special COVID-19 health packages started to reach tens of thousands of overseas Chinese students. Ordered and distributed by Chinese Consulates and affiliated student and scholar associations, these health packages were delivered with a special message attached – “the homeland is always by your side”. Meanwhile, Chinese students found themselves stranded in various pandemic hotspots due to prolonged national lockdowns mandated by China’s stringent zero-Covid policies and persistent international travel restrictions. How did Chinese students continue to celebrate a sense of being cared for by the state when millions were forcibly stopped by heightened infrastructural barriers and denied the possibility of returning home? Focusing on Covid health packages, this paper explores the many layers of infrastructural processes at play – logistical, socio-cultural, technological, and emotional. Affective attachments are activated as patchwork remedies for halted physical infrastructures, serving to align and redirect individual hope while normalising rejections, failures, and neglect. Covid health packages offer insight into how nationalist affect is made infrastructural to stabilize and uphold a tightly controlled (im)mobility regime during troubled times. Overseas students are drawn towards specific Chinese attachments infused with state promises of provision and care, with which many find special meanings in their own immobility and prolonged isolation.