Yan Long, University of California-Berkeley
This study investigates the installment and management of targeted lockdowns in urban China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Departing from the scholarly focus on either top-down governance mechanisms or the spontaneously rising societal (in)compliance, it highlights the overlooked daily practices of government workers in soliciting consent and collaboration from residents. Through fifty in-depth interviews with frontline workers in a Southern Chinese city, this research reveals that targeted lockdowns were not executed orchestrations of high formal state capacity. Instead, they were fraught with procedural, material, and personnel deficiencies and digital breakdowns, leading to administrative chaos and intensified resident disobedience. this research argue that it was frontline workers’ informal affective labor—interpersonal emotional engagement and communal relationship building—that were repairing social order and holding together the neighborhood governance system on the verge of collapse. These findings provide a granular reevaluation of the enforcement and eventually recession of targeted lockdowns that may continuously shape post-pandemic urban neighborhood governance.