Lausan HK reviews Social Contagion
For Lausan HK, JN reviews Social Contagion and other material on microbiological class war in China by Chuang, forthcoming from us on November 23, 2021—and available now for preorder from AK Press.
Lausan’s review “Every weakness is claimed as strength” deems Social Contagion a “critical” work in the age of COVID, against rampant “disinformation campaigns” and “conspiratorial discourse against China as a civilizational enemy.” Here is an excerpt:
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“A “SARS outbreak” on the mainland was first reported by media in Hong Kong on December 30, 2019. For those living in or involved with politics in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, the past year and a half has meant being subjected from all sides to a seemingly endless torrent of conspiratorial, reductive analyses of China’s “totalitarian and dystopic” Covid response. For Hong Kong, this developed out of unique circumstances: Covid arrived after 6 months of turmoil and non-stop protest in the streets, online, and at home. At the same time, as many protesters began to reassess strategy or simply burned out, the pandemic upended everything by investing the government with renewed “neutral” public health authority to control public gatherings and social behavior. For many youth protesters, who were already facing trouble for their radical “yellow” politics from “blue,” pro-police or pro-government parents, a tense home life or even homelessness became existential threats during a pandemic.
The distrust of the government and antipathy towards increasingly hardline police soon shifted gears as those same repressive, bureaucratic forces mismanaged pandemic resources and withheld information about Covid response from the general public. Hong Kong people’s much-lauded grassroots response (thanks in part to prior experience with SARS in 2003 but sharpened to a point through anti-government mutual aid during the 2019 protests), was swift and many credit the successful containment of Covid in Hong Kong not to the government but the general population’s voluntary participation in public health best practices.
Yet the government’s bad faith response, particularly Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s opaque statements and arrogant attitude at press conferences, and Hong Kong people’s understandable snowballing distrust of present authorities, also created the conditions that furthered the growing commonsense perception of an omnipotent Chinese state, one that responded to Covid containment and political resistance with equally monolithic and fetterless power. In other words, 2019 saw popular conceptions of China in Hong Kong rapidly exaggerate long-simmering distrust of the Chinese state into caricature, due in large part to the CCP’s own blustery claims to totalizing supremacy.
Into this fray, Chuang’s widely-circulated 2020 essay “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China” arrived like a beacon, with its materialist contextualization of not only Covid in China but the social and political circumstances of the pandemic’s planetary impact. Chuang’s greatest strength is in writing communist critique that takes Marx’s materialist method seriously in analyzing China’s socialist developmentalism and its transition into capitalism in their influential essays such as “Sorghum and Steel” and “Red Dust.” This requires an understanding of history not as a self-apparent script that we read from in order to validate our interests in the present but as a set of evolving social relations that allow us to trace and make determinations about the rationale and accuracy of people’s present-day analyses, statements, and actions—whether that be the Party, workers, local village elites, US news media, politicians, academic ideologues, or the online commentariat. Public discourse regarding Covid has gotten progressively worse since the essay’s publication, with disinformation campaigns and lab leak theories reaching wide distribution, which has furthered the conspiratorial discourse against China as a civilizational enemy. These dire conditions make Chuang’s book Social Contagion: and other material on microbiological class war in China (Charles H. Kerr 2021), including a revised version of the titular essay, all the more critical.
Preorder Social Contagion from AK Press at https://www.akpress.org/social-contagion.html.