ABSTRACT

The spring of 2003 has been vividly described as the ‘spring of masks’ in China.1

Soon after the nation staged the largest ever AIDS campaign on World AIDS Day (1 December 2002), an unknown ‘white’ anxiety of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) took the place of the known ‘red’ threat of HIV/AIDS.2

Enveloped in a SARS panic, the whole nation was decorated with all sorts of masks that smelt of disinfectant. The successive red threat and white anxiety have brought about a quiet cultural revolution in Chinese society. Unlike the Maoist one, this revolution is not one of ideology led by the state; rather, it is a revolution of information vectors. It is part of what has been called the ‘silent revolution’ that is leading to the re-subjectification of post-Mao citizens.3

Upon closer look, though, these post-Mao citizens are not silent: they talk, link and click. By talking on the radio and the television, linking with others through real and virtual networking and clicking the keyboard of the mobile phone and/or computer, these citizens, especially those from the urban middle classes, are able to appropriate and expand the circulatory matrix of narrative, subjectivity and citizenship. New media have become the venue and means for post-Mao citizens to re-form subjectivities and exercise citizenship, which in turn exposes the politics of AIDS and SARS in urban China. AIDS and SARS, as potential global epidemics that have affected millions

of lives in China alone, are sites of signification and knowledge in contemporary biopolitics. As they represent social and cultural crises, as well as biomedical ones, both syndromes have provided opportunities for the state and society to reconstitute and re-situate their subjective positions in relation to each other. AIDS and SARS have also opened up space to re-examine the information revolution that is changing China’s popular media topology. Faced with a morality-loaded virus (AIDS) and a highly contagious virus (SARS), people have readjusted their strategies of expression and interaction through the use of new media, which offer them channels of (relative) freedom and convenience at low cost. As a result, communication has increasingly taken the form of written rather than oral transmissions. If the viruses have opened space for the reconstitution of public discourses on subjectivity and citizenship, the use of new media has facilitated the formation and circulation of such discourses and provided new venues for subject formation.