The Communist Party’s Nervous System: Affective Governance from Mao to Xi

• In Event: Managing Power and Crises in Xi Jinping's China (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

In its one hundred years of existence, the Communist Party of China has experimented with how to connect its narratives of legitimacy to people’s emotions. In this essay, I trace the conceptualization gratitude, from its repudiation in the Mao era as a vestige of feudalism and imperialism to its return in the reform era as a re-verticalization of Party sovereignty. I argue that gratitude is more than an expression of emotion but a structure of sovereign power in which the people owe the Communist Party for their flourishing.
The paper addresses four examples of gratitude work: Politburo Standing Committee Member Wang Yang’s short-lived critique of gratitude in the name of a different conception of popular sovereignty; the celebration of the 10thanniversary of the Sichuan earthquake as a day of gratitude; the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are taught to be grateful to the Communist Party in a campaign of religious de-radicalization; the refusal of gratitude in quarantined Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, the Communist Party sovereignly stands at the threshold between bio- and necro-politics, promising life and salvation in the midst of death and destruction.

Author

• Christian Phillip Sorace, Colorado College