Pang Laikwan (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

This paper focuses on the wide popularity of the meme and buzzword jiucai, garlic chives, on China’s internet to investigate the cultural and political subjectivity of the ordinary Chinese citizens in a time of fierce competition simply to survive, largely known as neijuan, involution. Through this investigation of the garlic chives meme, the paper also updates Foucault’s theory of the biopolitics by investigating the deeply intertwined relation between the biological, the economic, and the political in contemporary Chinese governmentality. While the post-socialist PRC has developed a sophisticated economic rationality to legitimize its state sovereignty, this economic sovereignty also strains the ordinary subjects so much that it begins to pose serious challenge to this legitimacy.