Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2022, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (3): 125-158.

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The Moral (Bio) Politics of the Abnormal:Situating a Southwest China Border Town in the Global AIDS Governance

FANG Hongxin   

  1. School of Social and Public Administration, East China University of Science and Technology
  • Published:2022-07-16
  • Supported by:
    This paper is sponsored by the First-Class Discipline Construction and Characteristic Development Guidance Special Funds for the Central Universities (SLE00212004).

Abstract: This paper analyses the interaction of the two models in the social process of global AIDS governance and explores the possibilities of social innovation of society in its response to risks. The two moral regimes coping with problematized situations in the contemporary world are conceptualized as "center" and "border" respectively. "center" promotes normative educational discourse in the name of defending society, reifying order and pursuing cost-effectiveness in actual operations. "border"undertakes exploratory social action guided by a specific idea of goodness. While the two approaches engage in continuous battles, integration and penetration between themselves, people living with HIV worldwide were first degraded into a separated biomedical pariah population, and then were brought under the strict medical regime of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy(HAART). This shift between abject exclusion and exceptional inclusion indicates the meta-structure of life governance in the contemporary world.
China's border cities are key outposts of global AIDS governance that reflect how the institutional deployment of exclusion and inclusion extends from global to local. The "zuo aizibing"(doing AIDS projects) in Biancheng, a southwest China border town embodies typically as well as uniquely the complicated "center/border"entanglement. The "border" organised "infected peer groups" are embedded in the local official governance system, incarnating as "frontline foot soldiers" serving as the "center", facilitating a smoother integration of the city's HIV-positive people into the public health monitoring system, where they are disciplined to become docile medical subjects. The groups, in adaptable symbiosis with the normative deployment, have also been able to open up entirely new fields of social action on their own, allowing a humanitarian vision to be replayed, "translated" and implemented. Through the transmission of knowledge, affection and vitality, the groups have freed their HIV-positive peers, otherwise abandoned by normative logic, from stigmatization, from being limited by disease and treatment and to start the pursuit of new forms of life. As a global social experiment, the "border", as revealed by AIDS, has far-reaching implications for exploring the inclusive and open potential of society itself.

Key words: moral, governmentality, HIV/AIDS, biopolitics, humanitarianism