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In this paper, we explore what the travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal about the changing geographies of mobilities and the making of homo sacer, the latter constituted through differentiated control of mobilities. Implemented to protect U.S. public health, travel restrictions imposed on travelers from Mainland China during the early days of the pandemic exemplify how sovereign power that declares a state of emergency and creates bare life can be readily applied to groups of people who previously had privileged access to global mobility. In this sense, bare life does not refer to fixed and disadvantaged social categories but is rather contingently and contextually constituted, through the works of hybrid sovereign regimes. At the same time, however, these travelers are not reduced to a state of zero-agency but reside within a liminal space between soft and hard cosmopolitanisms, as they can still deploy agency and cosmopolitan capital to achieve certain degrees of mobility. By examining how Chinese travelers navigated various travel restrictions and the constantly changing policies to travel to the U.S., this paper explores new spaces of exception and forms of bare life, and argues that homo sacer is dynamically, relationally and recursively constructed, both through apparatus of control and the agency of travelers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, the approach of the Chinese government remains under the spotlight, obscuring the complex landscape of responses to the outbreak within the country. Drawing upon the author's social media experiences as well as textual analysis of a wide range of sources, this paper explores how the Chinese public responded to the outbreak in complex and nuanced ways through social media. The findings challenge conventional views of Chinese social media as simply sites of self-censorship and surveillance. On the contrary, during the COVID-19 outbreak, social media became spaces of active public engagement, in which Chinese citizens expressed care and solidarity, engaged in claim-making and resistance, and negotiated with authorities. This paper situates this public engagement within a broader context of China's health-care reforms, calling attention to persistent structural and political issues, as well as the precarious positionalities of health-care workers within the health system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new concept called virus-combat social capital and presents relevant findings from a survey of 3009 Chinese WeChat networkers. Virus-combat social capital is defined by the intensity and extensity of social connectedness under conditions of physical isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey shows that as compared to their counterparts, Chinese people with higher virus-combat social capital consistently do better in both behavioral responses and measures of quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The governmental responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, including the approach, interventions, and their associated effectiveness, vary across social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts. In China, the Wuhan lockdown significantly reduced the transmission of COVID-19 throughout the country. Chinese central and local governments' responses to disease containment and mitigation were uniform in policymaking but implemented differently across local governing contexts. This study examines the variation in the effects of human mobility restrictions on inter-provincial migration flow during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. The results show that mobility restrictions reduced the inter-provincial in-migration flow by 63%, and the out-migration flow by 62% from late January to early May in 2020, but the effects varied significantly across provinces. Further, the negative effects of mobility restrictions on province's outflow migration were greater in provinces where local governments had higher levels of social media involvement, greater public security spending, and longer duration of first-level response to public health emergencies. The finding provides important insights for understanding China's local governmental responses to mobility restrictions and their effects on the spread of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]