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In this article, I try to document the lived experiences of nurses who were sent to Wuhan to work in the COVID‐19 wards and consider the impact of such experiences on their psychological well‐being. I show the contextual factors in Wuhan, the inherent nature of nursing during the pandemic and the transition from the immediate reactions of nurses to long‐term impacts on their personalities, formed through the whole process of abjection. Therefore, I argue that we need to consider how nursing experiences, before, during and after their professional work in the wards, would instigate abjection within nurses. The abjection of nurses does not start only from the ward, nor does it not end in the ward. Rather, the abjection of nurses, as a reaction to lived experiences, is nuanced and the study of it can reveal rich details of nurses' life both inside and outside of the ward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the moral review councils (MRCs) established in China's rural areas since the early 1980s. I show that MRCs create a liminal plebeian public sphere in the context of a civilising offensive that deals with the uncivil behaviours of individuals and disputes between neighbours. In this plebeian public sphere, the MRC incorporates techniques of the Maoist mass meeting, the democratic election, traditional mediation and a pedagogy of exemplars, all of which are depoliticised into purely technical instruments. Their institutional legitimacy comes from organised virtues based on councillors' male seniority and the democratic method of their selection. MRCs, as an instrument of a civilising offensive, are a kind of paternalistic technology, which involves a complex strategy of a hybridity of acts, relationships, thoughts, desires and temptations of village residents in the context of the reform era. The people targeted in this civilising offensive often experience two levels of stigmatisation and their participation determines the effectiveness of the operation of MRCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence of the role of "moral doctors" who volunteer in what are called "moral clinics" in Huzhou city. In these moral clinics, the characteristics, experiences, and attributes of older women, in particular, are highly valued and viewed as being essential to the role of the moral doctor. These moral doctors act as moral exemplars and conflict mediators in their local communities. Their moral capital and professionalism, combined with their gender, age, familial and neighborhood attributes, contribute to the accumulation of an affective feminized labor which employs the techniques of care, reason, and moral fortitude to govern the self and others. We unpack these ethical virtues exemplified by moral doctors and nurses in order to show how a female‐centric "ethic of care" can become a set of techniques in governing others. In this paper, we elaborate on the role that these moral doctors perform to support the aims of the moral clinics in terms of fostering pro‐social behavior and moral obligation in local communities. We argue that the performance of this type of "moral work" is both a mechanism of discipline and a process of self‐actualization. We contribute to the current literature on "therapeutic governance" in China by showing how the non‐expert medicalization of social ills by moral doctors is incorporated into the reproduction of social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the daily practices of caring for COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, in early 2020 and the challenges that nurses faced. The paper shows that the affective contagion, especially among patients, introduced unexpected challenges for nurses in caring for COVID-19-infected patients. Nurses had to contend with the challenges of treating both physical and psychological problems in patients simultaneously. As a result, it was necessary for nurses to adapt to the different rhythm of COVID-19 wards to address these challenges and do so through taking on a range of general and specific nursing tasks and playing a diverse range of roles on the wards, from garbage collector to "psychological counselor." Thus, the paper brings attention to the experiences and demands of providing nursing care in an emergency pandemic context, in particular the necessity of responding to both the physical and the psychological needs of patients. These insights could better prepare health services in China and elsewhere in the world for responding effectively to potential future pandemics. • The affective contagion introduced unexpected challenges for nurses in COVID-19 wards. • Nurses adapt to the different working rhythm in COVID-19 wards than in "normal" wards. • A hierarchy of necessity emerged in the context of caring for COVID-19 patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]