Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China's pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state's inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state's domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China's AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups—notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men—along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.

Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China's subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations—such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers—within public health systems.

Yan Long is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a political and organizational sociologist studying the interactions between globalization and authoritarian politics across empirical areas such as public health, civic action, urban development, and digital technology.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgement

Introduction: Transnational Politics of Pandemics

Part I. Hidden Epidemics, 1978-1999
Chapter 1: Institutional Ignorance: When the State Manufactures an Epidemic
Chapter 2: Victims Unseen
Chapter 3: Homosexuality Invisibility, Heterosexual Advocates

Part II. Politicizing Epidemics, 1999-2009
Chapter 4: inding Victims: The Rise of Biopolitical Citizenship
Chapter 5: Biosocial Solidarity
Chapter 6: Bureaucratic Feasting on AIDS Projects
Chapter 7: Quantitative Participation as a Managerial Tool

Part III. A "China Model" of Epidemics, 2009-2018
Chapter 8: Seeing Gay Men like a Project
Chapter 9: Erasing the Dead
Chapter 10: A New Global Health Leader on the Rise?

Conclusion: From AIDS to COVID-19 and Beyond

References