The Chinese biopolitical: facing the twenty-first century

Abstract

Today the dominant science and technology studies (STS) story about the politics “life itself” sees an epochal shift in which the classic Foucauldian biopolitics of the population has disappeared, giving way to new forms of politics focusing on the management of individual genetic risk. With most STS scholars focusing on the politics of frontier sciences and technologies, especially in the West, the biopolitics of population collectives has received little sustained attention. Based on close study of China, this paper argues that the familiar biopolitical story is Eurocentric, and that on a more inclusive map of the world the politics of population governance remains an essential terrain of the politics of life. In China, the politics of population has been crucial to the development of capitalism and to the nation's rise to global prominence. Responding to the challenges of a changing world economy, in the twenty-first century the biopolitics of population is mutating, becoming less econocentric and more focused on social and even human governance. Far from declining, the biopolitics of the population is becoming ever more significant, profoundly changing the way China and its people are governed. The story of biopolitics in the molecular age is more complex and collective than we had thought.