Talking Politics: China’s Zero-COVID Era And The Middle Class Political Consciousness

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: The Politics of COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and China’s zero-COVID strategy marked a critical juncture in state-society relations, reshaping how the urban middle class perceives governance, authority, and political legitimacy. While existing scholarship largely examines the top-down rationale behind China’s pandemic governance, this study adopts a bottom-up, sensemaking approach to analyze how pandemic policies were interpreted by civilians, particularly the urban middle class in Shenzhen. Based on two rounds of semi-structured interviews with 40 participants over two years, supplemented by ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces how individuals made sense of evolving policies, state rhetoric, and their own lived experiences. Findings reveal that while initial compliance was framed as a civic duty, prolonged exposure to policy inconsistencies, opaque decision-making, and grassroots enforcement failures cultivated skepticism and political introspection. This study introduces the concept of a “reservoir of knowledge” to describe the accumulation of firsthand experiences that subtly reframed middle-class perceptions of state legitimacy. Contrary to assumptions that China’s middle class remains politically quiescent due to economic co-optation, this research illustrates how pandemic governance prompted critical re-evaluations of political authority, potentially altering long-term patterns of state-society engagement in authoritarian contexts.

Author

• Chenjie Song, University of Chicago