The “Bad” and the “Sick”

In China, a wide range of anti-social behaviors are increasingly being reframed as clinical ‘disorders’ that require specific medical interventions to cure. Stories of ‘insatiable desire,’ ‘addiction,’ and ‘contagion’—particularly in relation to juvenile behavior—pervade the media. This ‘medicalization’ may be understood as a form of control: social boundaries are redrawn and policed in the face of ‘unwholesome’ and destabilizing global influences. The pathologizing of ‘deviant’ behavior in China, then, has little to do with the technical repair of the body but a lot to do with social, cultural, and political processes.