“What's going on with my China?”: Political subjectivity, scalar inquiry, and the magical power of Li Wenliang

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines how the death of Li Wenliang, in February 2020, served as an affordance for Chinese netizens to engage with their intimate sense of themselves as political subjects through the interrogative process of scalar inquiry. Li, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who was sanctioned by Chinese authorities in 2019 for warning friends about the virus, was also an eminently normative and successful Han Chinese citizen who many saw as a reflection of themselves. His persecution, public humiliation, and death thus indexed the vulnerability of even the most compliant subjects and triggered an unprecedented public response that included both grief and outrage. Although largely censored within hours, this response continued to emerge throughout the year in a public mega‐thread on his Weibo “Wailing Wall.” This article draws on an alternative archive of censored messages on Li's Weibo page—usually described as an affective, apolitical space—to demonstrate how the Wailing Wall also becomes a unique sociomoral space in which people collaboratively reflect upon their sense of themselves as embodied subjects. Scalar inquiry, I suggest, thus emerges as a continual, collaborative, and simultaneously personal and political process of interrogating citizenship and nationhood vis‐à‐vis the remembered past, the experienced present, and the anticipated future.