ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyze cases of deaths without being properly mourned through death rituals as a result of the COVID-related lockdown in Wuhan between 2019 and 2020. We engage the concept of obligatory death to answer questions emanating from those who lost loved ones without proper burials or death rituals traditionally valued in the Chinese culture. Drawing on the notion of “thanatopolitics” and the Chinese cultural value that emphasizes the individual’s obligation to serve the collective and the state, we contend that obligatory death is a result of the politics by which the governments let certain groups die in order to make other groups live; that is, death is produced to generate conditions of life. Conditions for the death of some people during the COVID outbreak were created to ensure stability of both the local medical system and the social and political order. The analysis of such obligatory death sheds light on how biopolitics and thanatopolitics might function, alone or together, in different cultural contexts, and in a historically and politically specific Chinese context.
