Affective Lockdown: Administrative Chaos and Informal Repairing in Urban China during COVID-19
Abstract
Targeted COVID-19 lockdowns in urban China often suffered from procedural, material, and staffing deficiencies that produced administrative chaos and resident disobedience. Drawing on fifty interviews with frontline workers in a southern Chinese city, this article examines “affective labor”: emotional engagement and the cultivation of communal relationships used to make coercive policies workable. These informal practices blurred the boundaries among surveillance, public service, and confinement. They reduced resistance and repaired a bureaucratic system struggling to maintain neighborhood control, with consequences for both the enforcement and retreat of lockdown and for post-pandemic neighborhood governance.
Summary
Research Question
How did frontline workers respond when formal lockdown procedures failed to secure resident compliance and effective neighborhood control?
Main Argument and Findings
Frontline workers repaired administrative breakdowns through affective labor—emotional engagement and relationship building that made coercive rules more tolerable and enforceable. This work reduced resistance but also blurred the line between care and control, service and surveillance.
Data and Methods
Fifty interviews with frontline workers involved in targeted COVID-19 lockdowns in a southern Chinese city, analyzed to identify administrative deficiencies and the informal practices used to address them.
Contribution
The article explains how informal relational work can sustain formal coercive policy during administrative failure. It connects street-level implementation, emotion, and neighborhood governance while revealing how care can become part of systems of surveillance and confinement.
Keywords
affective labor · COVID-19 lockdowns · frontline workers · administrative chaos · informal repair · neighborhood governance · surveillance · urban China