Maintainers of Stability: The Labor of China’s Data-Driven Governance and Dynamic Zero-COVID

Title of the Paper

Maintainers of Stability: The Labor of China’s Data-Driven Governance and Dynamic Zero-COVID

Bibliographic Information

• Subject Areas: Data-driven governance, social computing, pandemic management, maintenance work
• Keywords: Maintenance, data-driven, data, governance, labor, affect, COVID, China

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • China adopted a "dynamic zero-COVID" policy, but its implementation revealed multiple challenges in technological and social collaborative governance.
  • The paper analyzes the failure of data-driven governance systems during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown and the burden on the supporting systems behind it.
  • Social dissatisfaction and the maintenance of political legitimacy have become profound issues within data-driven governance.

• Significance:

  • Data-driven governance has become the foundation of governmental legitimacy, playing a critical role not only in public health but also in social stability.
  • The complete failure of the Shanghai lockdown exposed the limitations of this governance model and its heavy reliance on "bottom-up" coordination and maintenance labor.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Current research and public discourse often portray China’s data-driven governance as a form of pure digital authoritarianism, overlooking the role of ordinary citizens in maintaining stability.
  • This paper introduces "maintenance" and "affective labor" into the research framework of data governance, challenging the monolithic understanding of the state’s omnipotent governance capacity.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Research Methods or Framework:

  • Through long-term ethnographic research, the paper analyzes the technological and affective labor during the dynamic zero-COVID policy from the perspectives of "system maintenance" and "affect management."

• Innovative Contributions:

  • Proposes the framework of "circumscribed agency" to interpret how lower-tier technical volunteers served the state while expressing subtle resistance during the lockdown.
  • Focuses on the interactive work of technology, data, and affect, demonstrating why "zero-COVID governance" relies not only on data-driven systems but also heavily on human labor and emotional engagement.

• Implementation Steps/Key Techniques:

  • Analyzes the multiple dimensions of data and affective labor (data collection, verification, emotional mediation).
  • Investigates how platforms like WeChat were used to coordinate pandemic information during the lockdown.
  • Utilizes ethnographic data to reveal how pandemic tools (e.g., nucleic acid testing apps) and related technical systems depended on human "patching" to maintain their functionality.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Achievements:

  • Demonstrates that Shanghai’s "data-driven governance" was not as fully automated as officially promoted but relied on grassroots volunteers as intermediaries to reconstruct data and stabilize emotions.
  • Introduces the theory of "circumscribed agency," which provides a form of technical resistance and emotional expression within a stringent governance system.

• Advantages Compared to Existing Approaches:

  • Unlike traditional perspectives of "digital authoritarianism," this paper emphasizes the dependencies of data governance and the overlooked labor processes at the local level.
  • Citizens are not merely "objects of control" in this process; particularly, laborers with technical operational capabilities become micro-level agents.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • The Shanghai pandemic management lockdown revealed numerous "technical failures" that required manual maintenance, such as manually verifying QR code data and tirelessly coordinating misaligned information across multiple data platforms.
  • On a micro level, many technological innovations did not directly enhance governance efficiency but instead reflected efforts to sustain a sense of order.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: The research is primarily based on the single event of the 2022 Shanghai lockdown and does not cover broader dynamics in other Chinese cities or long-term governance.
  • Future Directions: Explore how this "human patchwork" governance mechanism operates in other scenarios and whether the limited agency of ordinary volunteers can lead to actual political or technological improvements.