Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China

Please join us on January 26, 2026 for our first PACS-SCANCOR seminar series featuring Yan Long, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley! 

Topic: Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China

Challenging conventional wisdom crediting domestic factors with shaping health institutions, this talk demonstrates how foreign organizations, government agencies, and grassroots activists collectively transformed China’s epidemic governance. Under pressure from international norms and donors (especially from the U.S. and U.K.), Chinese officials selectively absorbed Western epidemiology and liberal practices such as community participation, human rights discourse, and NGO engagement to enhance China’s global standing. Rather than promoting political liberalization, these engagements enabled the state to build a professionalized yet stratified disease surveillance system that laid the groundwork for its COVID-19 responses. This hybrid system empowered certain groups such as urban gay men to gain state recognition and resources, while making other marginalized populations invisible. This talk corrects a core misconception—that liberal diffusion and authoritarian expansion are opposite—by revealing their mutual constitution in biomedical politics.

Recent publications

Digital Chaos: The Bureaucratic Labors of the COVID-19 Smart City and Its Aftermath. My second book project challenges the popular depiction of authoritarian digitalization as a seamless, automated apparatus of control--an all-seeing panopticon of cameras, dashboards, and algorithms.  Based on hard-to-get 130 interviews with government officials in three cities, I reveal how China's smart city expansion since the COVID-19 epidemic is a far more fragmented, labor-intensive, and fragile enterprise that is enabled and constrained by the existing bureaucratic dynamics.

About Yan Long

Yan Long is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a political and organizational sociologist whose research examines how globalization and authoritarian politics intersect in domains such as public health, civic action, and digital technology. Her award-winning articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and Social Science & Medicine, among others. Her book, Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China (Oxford University Press, 2024), has received four national distinctions, including the 2025 Best Book on Asia from the American Sociological Association.

Learn more about the Organization and Organizing for Public Good Seminar Series.