Abstract
This article analyzes the 2010 Shanghai Expo's narrative surrounding the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to examine how disaster politics illuminate the politics of citizenship. It focuses on how the Chinese state attempted to establish sovereignty through offering an “exchange” in which the citizen-subjects of biopolitics were constructed as owing a particular debt to the state for the sovereignty project to succeed. Through exploring the “biopolitics of gratitude” and the “biopolitics of equivalence,” the article shows how the earthquake's minority “victim” was brought into the fold of the nation through the commodity project while the earthquake volunteer was recognized as the instantiation of the state through participation in civil society.
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