Imposing immobility and making mobility: an infrastructural reading of Beijing’s impactful but ineffective temporal mode of COVID governance

This study examines China’s COVID governance through the case of Beijing from April to June 2022. To manage the biopolitical paradox between mobility and immobility brought forward by the pandemic, the Chinese state mobilised a temporal mode of COVID governance, implementing drastic containment measures aimed at ‘zeroing out’ viruses in the shortest possible time while minimising socio-economic cost. This approach entailed imposing immobility and making mobility according to the specific temporal—spatial arrangements of time—space compression in a state of exception, within which a spatial configuration of simultaneity for infrastructural intervention emerged. However, the two groups of infrastructures deployed for these purposes ultimately generated excessive socio-economic costs, while achieving ‘zeroing out’ over an extended period, revealing Beijing’s impactful but ineffective COVID governance. This outcome invites reflection on how China’s temporal mode of governance was enacted and reciprocally challenged by the very infrastructures deployed as its instruments.