Please join us on Wednesday, November 13 at 12pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China, by Yan Long, Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Professor Long will be joined in conversation by Matthew Kohrman, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University; and Rachel E. Stern, Professor of Law and Political Science at Berkeley Law, and the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. The panel will be moderated by Tom Gold, Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
About the Book
Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China’s pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state’s inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state’s domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China’s AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.
Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China’s subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems.
About the Panelists
Yan Long is Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. She is a political and organizational sociologist studying the interactions between globalization and authoritarian politics across empirical areas such as public health, civic action, urban development, and digital technology, with a geographic focus on China. Long’s recent research investigates the urban politics around COVID-19 testing in China. She concentrates on how community mobilization facilitates or undermines the utilization of digital tools in public health measures. Her past papers include “Selling under Stigma: The Relational Gender Dynamics of Becoming Biolaborers in China” (Social Science & Medicine); “Dance with Glauthoritarian Urbanization: An Entrepreneurial Megacity in the Making through the Lenses of Civic Organizations” (Global Perspectives, with Wei Luo); and “Relational Work and Its Pitfalls: Nonprofits’ Participation in Government-Sponsored Voluntary Accreditation” (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. With Wei Luo and Wenjuan Zheng).
Matthew Kohrman is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and, by courtesy, Department of Medicine; Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People’s Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume–Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives–expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.
Rachel E. Stern is a Professor of Law and Political Science and currently holds the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. Her research looks at law in Mainland China and Hong Kong, especially the relationship between legal institution building, political space, and professionalization. Stern is the author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence (Cambridge University Press 2013), as well as numerous articles on legal mobilization and lawyers in contemporary China. Stern is currently part of a collaborative effort to analyze the 60+ million Chinese judicial decisions placed online following a 2014 policy change. This massive expansion in the public record of court activity promises to re-shape our understanding of Chinese law and, beyond China, of authoritarian legality. Before joining Berkeley Law and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, Stern was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows. She also currently serves as series editor for the Law and Society series at Cambridge University Press.
Tom Gold (moderator) is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1981 until 2018. His research focuses on social, political and cultural change in China and Taiwan. His most recent book is “Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong”, co-edited with Sebastian Veg.
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