Afterword: Pandemic governance in China

Abstract

This article outlines China’s pandemic governance as an ever-changing assemblage of old and new techniques, material forms, and organizational structures over the course of three years. It zooms in on the ways in which the party-state drew on and (re)combined previous experiences of handling infectious diseases, the constantly renewed technique of mass mobilization, and the seemingly high-tech and yet labor-intense digital technologies that had already permeated everyday lives in the different stages of designing and enforcing pandemic restriction measures. These changing governing practices are essential to contextualize the voices documented in this Currents collection.