China: Pandemic and repression, biopower and governmentality

• Main Author: Yeoh, Emile Kok Kheng
• Format: Article
• Published: Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Studies - National Sun Yat-sen University 2021
• Subjects: H Social Sciences (General)
• Online Access: http://eprints.um.edu.my/35471/; https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85119912395&partnerID=40&md5=600ef327c082225e52b443a5cb7c8bca
• Institution: Universiti Malaya

During this testing time of a devastating pandemic, since the great plague of the 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia spread from the world’s first explosive outbreak in Wuhan, China (mainland China, officially “People’s Republic of China”), across the world, the global tragedy has fast turned into an arena of influence contest between the world’s great powers, witnessing a ferocious, relentless effort by the Chinese Communist Party’s non-electoral one-party ruling regime to spin a potential image disaster for its free speech-stifling, free press-proscribing political governance model that is widely seen standing as the key contributor to the world calamity into a diplomatic triumph with a combination of huge blame-shifting propaganda and foreign relation carrots through its earlier “mask diplomacy” and later “vaccine diplomacy”. Interestingly, across the Taiwan Strait, the vibrantly liberal democratic island state of Taiwan (officially still the “Republic of China” on Taiwan since her political separation from the Chinese Communist Party-conquered mainland China in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War) has also been engaging in an important international publicity campaign emphasising the country’s role as the earliest whistle-blower who could have saved the world from this disaster if not being contemptuously sidelined and ignored by a World Health Organization (WHO) under Beijing’s sway, as well as, as the second largest face-mask-producing country in the world, a “mask diplomacy” of her own. It is thus opportune that China’s “mask diplomacy” and the PRC-Taiwan diplomatic tussle in general form the targets of investigation of the first two papers of this journal issue, and further to the focus on the cross-Strait relations in this issue’s beginning section on diplomacy and international relations is a commentary proposing a Taiwan response to political repression in Hong Kong – a central CCP one-party State action through an oppressive national security law for the special administrative region being enforced in earnest by a subservient SAR Chief Executive and her government after the recent pro-democracy fansongzhong (反送中, “anti extradition-to-China”) protests that rocked the territory, a tumultuous and momentous event covered in detail by the last special focus issue of this journal, For rights and liberty: The anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) protest movement and Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy.