Biopower and Stability Maintenance

Following Foucault, biopower refers to a specific set of social regulations and power relations which bring “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life.”Footnote ¹² Along this line, China scholars have examined various biopolitical technologies deployed to denounce “uncivilized” human conduct and thus produce a manageable “population,” and have declared that the rationale behind these technologies rests upon claims to “scientific truth.”Footnote ¹³ Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler, for example, argue that China's population policies have directly or indirectly shaped the desires, beliefs, interests and aspirations of the “population” without cultivating a consciousness for democracy and autonomy.Footnote ¹⁴ Others point to the underlying pattern of biopolitics, which has created two distinctive sets of social and population norms at two different periods of time: during the Maoist period (1949–76), people were expected to be the passive objects of administrative intervention; since the post-1978 reform period, they must be “high-quality” (gao suzhi 高素质) subjects adaptive to the competitive global environment.Footnote ¹⁵

The appropriation of the discourse of suzhi (素质) thus represents the hegemonic strategy of the state to produce status and identify people who are recognized as “civilized” and therefore more competent at adapting to the socialist market economy without causing chaos to governance.Footnote ¹⁶ However, the increasing bureaucratization of the market and the lack of a vibrant civil society have led to more frequent occurrences of politically contentious disputes in which resisters are increasingly portrayed as “uncivilized” and subjected to an array of biopolitical techniques and practices. For example, persistent petitioners in Beijing are regarded as dissidents, or even mentally disturbed.Footnote ¹⁷ Repressive measures such as arbitrary detainment, house arrest, or being put into “black jails,” are particularly targeted at political dissidents and human rights activists whose actions are interpreted as “troublemaking” and disruptive to the harmony of society.Footnote ¹⁸ Observers have also noted that when confronted, the state tends not to enforce the rule of law, but instead adopts “stability maintenance” measures aimed at lowering the level of reports of “incidents” and maintaining a facade of stability.Footnote ¹⁹ A key term both in the official lexicon and public discourse since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “stability maintenance” refers to the myriad extra-legal measures used to suppress resistance, including heavy internet and media censorship, illegal house arrests and beatings, and the harassment of blacklisted troublemakers.Footnote ²⁰ The tendency towards rule by exception (rather than rule of law) became more explicit when the proportion of the budget allocated to “maintaining [domestic] stability” exceeded that allocated to national defence in 2010.Footnote ²¹ Recent analyses further suggest how these budgets have opened up a national market for stability maintenance, involving the issuing of bonuses to local staff for resolving “incidents” and the hiring of private enterprises to stop petitioners.Footnote ²²

This article examines how occupational disease sufferers fail to be categorized as “normal” in the population. Many are self-described as “without suzhi,” a taboo people akin to homo sacer. Rather than being charged legally, the victims are subject to control strategies employed in the name of “stability maintenance.”

Before proceeding further, several facts must be presented. First, the two types of occupational disease covered in the present study – pneumoconiosisFootnote ²³ and cadmium poisoningFootnote ²⁴ – are incurable chronic diseases. Both diseases can have long latent periods, depending on the pathogenicity and the level of exposure to the contaminants. For instance, it generally takes between five and 20 years from the time of first exposure before the symptoms of pneumoconiosis manifest.Footnote ²⁵ As for cadmium poisoning, there are no known pathological patterns; however, our fieldwork findings suggest that workers exhibit early stage symptoms of poisoning after two to three years of work. There are no effective cures for the two diseases; sufferers can only take steps to inhibit the progression of the disease, alleviate their pain and discomfort, and hopefully lengthen their survival time.

On the surface, the rights of occupational disease victims are legally protected. But, as will be seen later, the laws and regulations pertinent to the occupational health and safety system have indeed created insurmountable institutional obstacles for sick workers. Consequently, they are usually deprived of any legal recourse or protection supposedly offered by the state.

Another important issue to note about the victims of these particular occupational diseases is that most of them look normal and healthy. Their illnesses are not immediately visible to others, but once detected or revealed, their status deteriorates quickly in concrete and measureable ways.Footnote ²⁶ For instance, they will be discriminated against in the current job market which expects the whole population to participate fully in the competitive market-driven economy. Ill-health hinders sufferers from performing basic cultural roles, such as being the breadwinner of the family, or the mother of healthy babies. It is therefore common for them to conceal their “patient” identity in order to avoid being marginalized in the economic and cultural realms.

Empirically, this article is based on a corpus of primary data, both qualitative (N = 107) and quantitative (N = 635), solicited from a convenient sample comprising peasant-workers suffering from either workplace-induced pneumoconiosis or cadmium poisoning. With the help of two Hong Kong-based NGOs (China Labour Force and Globalization Monitor (GM)), I was able to contact informants in Guangdong, Hunan, Sichuan and Chongqing between February 2010 and June 2012. The quantitative research component refers to a questionnaire survey,Footnote ²⁷ whereas the qualitative component refers to eight field visits to the Chinese cities mentioned, during which I conducted household interviews, group interviews and focus groups.Footnote ²⁸

Between the Public and the Private

Is occupational disease a public matter such that the victims are protected by law, and the state bears the ultimate moral responsibility? Or, is it a private, (inter)personal matter such that both the costs of and moral responsibility for the disease should be borne by the employee, or shared in one way or another by both the employee and employer? At first sight, it is not a private matter as a specific set of laws and regulations has been in place since the 2000s pertinent to the diagnosis and classification of occupational diseases and the calculation of compensation benefits.Footnote ²⁹ However, the distinction between the public and private becomes blurred as underlying these laws and regulations is the principle of employer liability. This means that the employer is held responsible by law, even if no fault attaches to him/her, to uphold protection measures in the workplace and to compensate an employee at prescribed rates for any injury suffered by the employee while at work.Footnote ³⁰ Stemming from this principle, the proof of a current “labour relationship” with the employer becomes essential in relation to the payment of occupational disease benefits. As such, what appears to be a public issue becomes more akin to a(n) (inter)personal matter.

Evidently, such a legal framework has led to a strong motivation on the part of the employer to minimize his/her responsibility to the occupational disease victims or simply to shrug off his/her liability for compensation. Employers are well aware that once sick workers have left the company, it is much more difficult for them to obtain compensation. This was borne out by informants who commonly reported difficulties in getting their employers to hand over all the necessary documents that could prove the labour relationship. Employers often refuse to provide workers with copies of these documents, or simply deny that the workers have ever worked for them. Many former gemstone/jewellery workers also recalled that after the company had arranged for physical examinations of all workers, it then refused to let the workers know the results of these examinations. At the same time, these workers became aware that more and more employees were being sacked with no obvious justification. Employers sacked employees for “reasons” such as violating company rules or because their particular job skills were no longer required, or else they forced them to resign by telling them that they had to transfer to a less stressful position which had yet to be created. A Hunan-based jewellery worker told me in Shenzhen about his painful experiences, which involved the police breaking into his home and then interrogating him at the police station:

Stories solicited from fieldwork revealed that when workers ignored orders to leave, the company usually resorted to brutal measures, such as deploying burly security guards to remove them physically from company premises. Some employers attempted to make deals with the workers by offering them minuscule compensation payments and asking them to return home to take care of their health. One employer even bribed some medical professionals to persuade cadmium-poisoned workers to leave the company. As one worker recalled:

Even when the labour relationship has been proved, employers may disagree that the occupational illness is caused by poor working conditions. Whenever disputes of this kind arise between the employer and employee, the worker's quest for compensation is forced to take a long-winded detour and turns into a labour dispute, which is then mediated by arbitrators from the local Labour Dispute Arbitration Committee (LDAC). Being a state-backed administrative body, the LDAC often rules in favour of the employer, or asks the employee to accept a level of compensation far less than what it would be if it were pursued via the normal legal procedures. If the employee disagrees with the arbitration ruling, he may file a lawsuit against the employing unit in a local court and seek a judicial ruling. If the local court agrees with the original arbitration ruling, the employee may have final recourse to appeal the ruling in a higher court. Evidently, all these complicated and time-consuming administrative and judicial procedures constitute virtually insuperable obstacles to most occupational disease sufferers.

Even for workers who possess the requisite employment records and choose to file their cases in court, information gathered during fieldwork suggests that employers deploy different ways to exert pressure on victims to limit their claims. For example, a group of four coal miners suffering from pneumoconiosis in Hunan revealed during interviews that their employer persuaded them to accept a small amount of compensation by saying that he would never pay the level of benefits ruled on by the court. Even in cases where the court finally judges in favour of the employees, employers adopt all means possible to evade their legal responsibilities to the victims. For example, they might file the company for bankruptcy, close the company down, change legal ownership, or even move to another place and re-open for business under a different name.

In Hunan, coal mine owners adopted the tactic of delaying payment by telling affected workers that the company did not have enough money to pay their compensation. According to one coal miner, his boss even persuaded sick workers to continue working for the company until it had enough cash to pay the compensation.Footnote ³³ In Guangdong, an owner of a jewellery company used the tactic of dividing the lump sum compensation ruled on by the court into monthly payments, and suggested that payment be spread over five years. Needless to say, there have also been instances of employers simply refusing to compensate sick or injured workers despite a court ruling, and cases where the sick or injured workers failed even to locate their previous employers.

The case for the poisoned workers was even more complicated. The court originally ruled in 2004 that the company had to pay 300 yuan per month to each sick worker for the purchase of health supplements. However, instead the company gave calcium tablets and milk powder to the workers each month and claimed that these “health supplements” were worth 300 yuan. These “supplements” turned out to be of low quality as the cadmium-poisoned women later found out: the calcium tablets were “inedible” and the milk powder contained melamine,Footnote ³⁴ which led many to suffer from kidney stones.Footnote ³⁵

The above findings illustrate the situations that commonly confront occupational disease victims. Although the law exists to protect them, the rights of the occupational disease victims are ignored, if not exploited, according to the actual same law. They are virtually experiencing a state of exception within which the law is – in Agamben's terminology – “in force without signifying,” and consequently, “all the legal determinations” with the very distinction between public and private become invalid.

Between the Productive and the Unproductive

Living with an incurable disease, or a victim of disease, inevitably creates a serious financial burden for a peasant's household. During the interviews, all respondents reported that their illness had adversely affected their normal work lives. For example, pneumoconiosis victims often found it difficult to work for other gemstone/jewellery companies or coal mines as they could not pass the pre-employment health checks. Most of the former gemstone/jewellery workers who had returned to rural areas after developing symptoms of pneumoconiosis revealed that they could no longer handle farm work which demanded heavy physical exertion. The cadmium-poisoned women reported that their physical pain and frequent respiratory tract infections prevented them from engaging in any full-time paid employment. At first sight, these sick workers have no choice but to consider themselves unproductive in society; however, in reality, their experiences of the economic world are far more ambivalent.

Under the state-promoted discourse of suzhi, to suffer from an incurable occupational disease would not only manifest in a physical trait, but also infer a moral inferiority in the victim's body. Sigley has rightly pinpointed that suzhi – in its most extreme form – functions as “a measure of human value which … constructs a hierarchy of worthiness and utility (of ‘low’ and ‘high’ quality, for instance).” Footnote ³⁶ It was common for respondents to describe themselves as “useless,” “rubbish people” (feiren 廢人), or “neither human nor ghost” (ren buxiang ren, gui buxiang gui 人不像人, 鬼不像鬼). All respondents, in one way or another, referred to their low worth and low productive value to their family in particular and society in general. For example, a cadmium-poisoned woman stated emotionally:

My survey findings further reveal that most of the sick workers were in serious debt.Footnote ³⁸ This explains why respondents often lamented that they could not afford “high quality” education for their children. Their narratives implied that they were worried about the intergenerational transfer of “low quality” (as well as “low worth”), as the suzhi-based stratification system in post-socialist China is closely linked to academic attainment.Footnote ³⁹

However, the occupational disease victims' subjective perception of being of “low quality” owing to an inability to move upwards socially only portrays one side of the story. Unlike many who are occupationally injured, most occupationally sick workers appear normal and healthy. The fact that they are unable to work and produce normally has indeed created a social marginality in which many of their neighbours, relatives and friends would consider them not as “victims,” but more often as “strange” (qiguai 奇怪). Occupationally sick workers are further marginalized as many of those who do return to their rural homes do not receive welfare benefits from the state, such as the minimum livelihood protection (dibao 低保), unlike those families who have a member who has been injured or who has died on the job. This phenomenon is related to what has been discussed before, that occupational disease is caught in between the public and private within the existing legal framework. Against this biopolitical backdrop, both sick workers and welfare authorities usually fail to convince each other that an occupational disease victim who looks physically sound should depend on state welfare rather than seek compensation from his/her employer, as stipulated by law, or should simply return to the market:

Consequently, sick workers find it difficult to decide whether to expose or conceal their illness as either way they are unable to avoid economic exclusion. A small proportion of the gemstone/jewellery workers surveyed who had received a sizable compensation (18.3 per cent who received 300,000 yuan or more) choose to set up their own small businesses, such as stores selling construction materials or groceries. Others, who worked for enterprises, tended to conceal their illness as they knew they would be dismissed if the employer found out that they were sick. Others were engaged in informal jobs, such as hourly-paid construction work, which did not require any medical certification of well-being. One former gemstone worker in Shenzhen who suffers from pneumoconiosis remarked:

He then explained that in order to get the security guard job he currently held, he needed to find a fellow townsman (tongxiang 同鄉) to help him fake his identity and pass the health check. Other respondents told me that even if the employer did not require a body check at the recruitment stage, their illness, which usually led to frequent sick leave, would quickly arouse the concern or even the dissatisfaction of the employer. Rather than reveal their illness to the employer, they would simply quit the job.

These experiences thus echo the notion of homo sacer in that the lives of sick workers are both external and internal to the world. They are poised to struggle with either participating in a normal working life or accepting their role as a sick person. At the same time, they also encounter the experience of double ambivalence as both identities fail to be understood in society. In other words, they are not recognized by economic and political institutions as a constituency; rather, once their identity as “sick” is exposed, they are deemed to be a kind of deficit or “problem” to be controlled and managed. However, unlike most victims of abject poverty, the plight of occupational sick workers often evokes not sympathy for the sufferers, but rather the sentiment that these individuals are “strange.” Furthermore, unlike committing a crime or suffering from a serious condition such as AIDS or drug addiction, the “problem” of living with an occupational disease often arouses neither fear nor condemnation, but just social neglect and apathy. It is against this background that I observed that most occupational disease victims find themselves caught in between the productive and unproductive in society.

Between the Culturally Normative and the Culturally Deviant

One aspect of occupational disease which has received almost no attention in the literature is its impact on a sufferer's (in)capability to uphold cultural roles. These impacts are particularly distressful to sufferers as their outlook on life is still deeply guided by the cultural schema emphasizing traditional gender roles. Such cultural schema predisposes that a husband is the figurehead and breadwinner of a family, whereas a wife almost exclusively takes on the reproductive and emotional roles. Such gender-based divisions of labour, albeit less rigid in the post-socialist era than before,Footnote ⁴⁴ still exert effective sanctions on the Chinese family. Role reversal between spouses, for instance, is relatively rare and generally viewed negatively.Footnote ⁴⁵ Against this cultural backdrop, occupationally sick workers frequently expressed their deep regret for failing to meet cultural expectations. For example, many respondents suffering from pneumoconiosis admitted that their illness had created insurmountable barriers to fulfilling their culturally normative roles as a husband, a father, a son, or even as a man. A former jewellery worker said that “as a man” (zou wei yige nanren 作为一个男人) in his 30s and 40s, one should “do big things” (gan dashi 干大事), and achieve success in one's career; however, all that he could manage to do was struggle with his illness in order to just stay alive. Similar sentiments were reiterated in the testimonies of former gemstone/jewellery workers. They lamented how they had failed to give a “better living” or a “hope for the future” to their wives and families. In my interviews with peasants-cum-coal miners in rural areas, the respondents suggested that lung disease, which substantially reduces physical fitness, had lowered their dignity “as a man.” One victim-turned-activist working for a Hong Kong NGO elaborated this point to me:

The 22 (out of 35) former gemstone/jewellery worker interviewees who had returned home with meagre or no compensation all expressed frustration at being dependent on their wives for their livelihoods in their rural homes. In my fieldwork, an oft-mentioned topic among gemstone/jewellery workers during lunchtime was wives who ran away because of their husband's illness. A couple of well-known cases even involved wives appropriating their husband's compensation and running off with other men. On one occasion, an interviewee mentioned the “joke” quoted at the head of this section, which pointed to the deep sense of bitterness of a sick man for not being able to uphold his roles as husband and father with dignity.

Those peasants who had spent over a decade working in urban areas and then had pursued lawsuits against their employers and the administrative authorities also experienced strong regret for being poor fathers. For example, one jewellery worker lamented:

Another respondent felt deep remorse for not being able to show the correct filial piety to his mother:

Female workers afflicted with cadmium poisoning found that their physical pain was exacerbated by the mental anguish and social ordeals they experienced because of problems with their pregnancies. I could not hide my shock during the first focus group with a group of cadmium-poisoned women when I found out that a quarter of them had miscarried during the time they had worked at the battery factory. One burst into tears when she said that she had suffered four miscarriages in the workplace. The respondents generally agreed that husbands dislike having an unhealthy wife who has problems having babies. Husbands were likely to end a marriage if they knew that their partner suffered from an occupational disease. Looking healthy, unmarried poisoned women, similar to many pneumoconiosis patients, thus tended to hide their illness from their boyfriends. One victim of cadmium-poisoning, who later became an NGO worker, told me that several former battery workers consistently refused to answer her ‘phone calls in order to conceal their illness from their family members.

For those who did manage to have a successful pregnancy, the health of their offspring was usually problematic. Their children often possessed a high susceptibility towards infectious diseases, such as influenza. One respondent choked up with emotion as she revealed that her six-year-old son was recently diagnosed which hydrocephalus – a disease which she believed to be related to her own disease. The cadmium-poisoned women felt unable to exercise their normative cultural roles fully. In addition, they often experienced discrimination from their in-laws and extended family members who blamed them for bringing poor health to the younger generation.

Like the pneumoconiosis patients, cadmium-poisoned workers appear healthy. Consequently, because the community does not understand the nature of the disease, it views the sick women as “strange” rather than as “victims.” In theoretical terms, occupational disease victims can be considered as being placed in a “zone of indistinction”Footnote ⁴⁹ and as such are not recognized as a constituency by existing social institutions such as family. In fact, those afflicted with occupational disease are quickly identified as cultural deviants once their status as patients is known.

State Power and the Rule of Exception

So far this article has examined how the character of occupational disease patients is elided between the public and the private, the productive and unproductive, and the culturally normative and deviant in situations where the biopower inherent in the specific set of social regulations and power relations has been exercised rather efficaciously. Similar to the conditions of bare life, the political life of the occupationally diseased is marginalized as their basic legal rights, material living and social well-being are no longer protected. One consequence is that the marginality experienced by occupationally sick workers seems to have become a blind spot in public concerns on labour. As emphasized before, such a public scotomization does not mean to infer their political exclusion. Rather, Agamben suggests that bare life is the “inner hidden norm” of modern sovereignty, and “gradually begins to coincide with the political realm.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Calling it a “disjunctive inclusion,” Ziarek explains that bare life “still remains the target of sovereign violence.”Footnote ⁵¹ My argument is that when occupational disease victims attempt to resist existing social regulations and power relations, they are reduced to homer sacer status and, in Agamben's words, they nakedly confront violence “without any mediation.”Footnote ⁵²

When discussing the capacities of bare life to subvert sovereign control, Leung and Pun seem to portray a rather optimistic picture.Footnote ⁵³ In their study of pneumoconiosis patients working in the gemstone industry, they examine the process through which workers’ resistance develops from a single means to multiple means, from single-factory to cross-factory participation, from engaging only in legal action to launching varied collective actions. However, if our gaze extends beyond a single-time, single-place case study, it becomes apparent that the resistance of occupational disease victims is actually rare.

Such a phenomenon can be understood in terms of the ambivalence of the target of resistance. As mentioned before, once employers notice that a worker is suffering from an occupational disease, they will use different means to sack the workers in order to shrug off their responsibility for compensation. In the case of gemstone/jewellery workers, many had received meagre compensation and had signed an agreement with the company that their dispute had been settled. Only a small proportion of workers resorted to legal redress by taking their employer to court. However, as noted above, often the courts rule in favour of the employers, which can then lead to a convoluted process involving seeking resolution through administrative reviews, pursuing labour dispute arbitration, and taking the case to court again and again. In such cases, neither the employer nor the court seem to be the targets of resistance as everything ostensibly follows the rule of law. But, there were cases where the workers felt that the employer had bought off the court, and that the rulings were unjust. Under such circumstances, ill workers might stage protests in front of the court; reportedly, one such protest at the Haifeng mid-level court lasted for over a year.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, since everything is done according to the law, sporadic resistance does not possess a “rightful” basis.Footnote ⁵⁵ The slogan “Demanding a Just Ruling,” usually chanted by resisters during such protests, was essentially more a moral accusation than a discourse that possessed legal substance. This phenomenon evokes the notion of homo sacer such that bare life is not located outside juridical power and made indifferent to it; rather, homo sacer is produced exactly because of the marginalization enforced by the legal framework. It is under such a juridical order of exception that bare life is “exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In Hunan, four coal mine workers recounted in interview that they were once approached by a labour arbitrator who offered to help them for free. However, it was eventually discovered that the arbitrator was linked to their employer, as he threatened the workers and tried to intimidate them into accepting a compensation deal that favoured the employer. In Guangdong, victims-turned-activists employed by Hong Kong NGOs complained that they faced constant harassment from the state as they worked to help occupational disease victims. All found themselves blacklisted and were denied visas to go abroad to protest against their former employers during “politically sensitive” periods such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics. State officials put pressure on landlords not to let apartments to a NGO for use as a workers' centre. When the NGO did hold group meetings at the centre, attendees would come at different times and leave individually or only in small groups. On the few occasions when there was a big group meeting, resident committees informed the police who arrived to question those attending the meetings about their activities. In Haifeng, five gemstone workers suffering from pneumoconiosis protested in front of the court for over a year, demanding that local judges enforce a previous court ruling and force their employer to compensate workers. Their actions of holding up banners and shouting slogans were occasionally met with physical violence from the security guards. On several occasions, workers were seriously bullied. More serious bloodshed occurred in August 2010 when over a hundred cadmium-poisoned workers protested outside the battery factory where they worked in Huizhou. The protestors were beaten up by mob of around a hundred people of unknown origin. One worker was seriously injured and, along with a dozen others, was subsequently hospitalized. Denying all connection to the mob, the factory refused to pay for any medical expenses, and the workers had to raise funds among themselves in order to pay the hospital bills.

When narrating their experiences of resistance, respondents all emphatically stated that their demands went unheard, that their rights were dispensable, and that their lives were miserable. They lamented that: “No police came after dialling 110”; “No one cares when we go to the police station”; “We called the media, but no journalists came”; and “We looked like neither humans, nor ghosts.” Implicit in the above examples is that the lives of the occupational disease victims are targets of oppression of the biopower through which the state (or the state-backed force) deploys different technologies, including legal and social means, to control the freedom of the governed. This explains why most victims felt that they were deprived of legal recourse through various means, and that they were considered social “problems” both economically and culturally. When the state sees that the resistance of occupationally sick workers poses a threat to the social order, the state exercises its power to “ban,” under which all laws, social regulations and established principles of human conduct are virtually abandoned. Clearly aware of the power to activate such a rule of exception, victims of occupational disease live in the shadow of implicit threats, and behind them all lurks the cruel face of state power – the power to reduce them to a state analogous to that of bare life. The creation of homo sacer thus represents the latent power of the state to marginalize, exclude, or even dispose of, unwanted people in the name of growth, progress and development.

Concluding Remarks: Maintaining Stability by Exception

The discussion above portrays sufferers of occupational disease as biopolitical subjects whose lives are located neither inside nor outside “normal” political, economic and cultural practices. These people fail to be categorized as “normal” by society according to the biopolitical idea of suzhi. And, in the experience of the sick workers, they are self-described as “without suzhi,” “strange,” “useless,” “rubbish people” or “neither human nor ghost.” They are at once both internal and external to society. They occupy a socially constructed and maintained space designated for those who are abnormal, or fundamentally, the other.Footnote ⁵⁷ And, in front of state power, they are placed in milieus where the law can no longer afford them protection, and are reduced, theoretically speaking, to a state analogous to that of bare life. They become a taboo people who are always vulnerable to policing and violence while simultaneously banished from society by a variety of formal and informal mechanisms of exclusion: legal, economic and social. It is exactly this biopolitical power to ban and the abandonment of subjects to bare life, which strips them of all basic political rights,Footnote ⁵⁸ that constitutes the origin of sovereignty in terms of rule by exception. One consequence is that when a small number of victims attempt to resist the power structures, they experience oppression either enforced or endorsed by the state, which cannot be effectively countervailed by any possible public means. The experiences of unchecked violence recounted in the personal testimonies of workers with occupational sickness carry wider implications for understanding the biopolitical nature of Chinese state power under the umbrella term of “stability maintenance” at the close of the Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 era (2002–2012).

During my study, both the workers who help occupational disease victims and the victims themselves who struggle to protect their own rights were aware of the ubiquity of “stability maintenance” measures. Their stories reveal how they were deemed “abnormal”; how their plight went unreported in the media; how their complaints were ignored by the police and their actions placed under surveillance; how they were blacklisted, and how, on occasion, they were harassed or even brutally beaten by people whose illegal actions were tacitly permitted by the law. Such uses of “stability maintenance” strategies actually attest to the normalization of both the state of exception and the reduction of resisters to depoliticized actors. The victims are neither imprisoned nor exiled, and are virtually placed in milieus of purported lawlessness where their lives and deaths cease to be of significance.

When the adoption of extra-legal means to control resisters and the defusing of conflict takes priority over the adjudication by law become the norms of governance, the estrangement of occupational disease victims discussed above will become the underlying nomos of everyday life, with the (threat of) excessive violence they encounter becoming the rule rather than the exception. The fact that internal security spending exceeded external defence outlay in the state's 2013 annual budget offers further support for this point.Footnote ⁵⁹ Very recently, Xi Jinping 习近平 has sent signals that this trend would be reversed, for example by vowing to uphold the constitution and rule of lawFootnote ⁶⁰ and announcing a tentative schedule to close down “black jails.”Footnote ⁶¹ However, I share the pessimism of some observers that, as long as the central government continues to use “zero incidents” (such as no petition, no strike, and no legal charges against state authority) as the key evaluation criterion of the local government, more budgets will be allocated to “stability maintenance” with the rule by exception becoming more foregrounded.Footnote ⁶² However, in reality, as shown by the case of occupational disease workers, these control strategies for dealing with “problems” are turning into spirals of abuse inflicted on the victims of the existing power structures and do not address the underlying social injustice.Footnote ⁶³