Political depression

Anna Iskra, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen

Why is the pandemic never-ending? Because there are people who don’t want it to end…. The pandemic acts as an excuse for the government to strengthen different measures of control…. I feel like it has become one of the sources of legitimacy for the government, or at least a self-claimed source of legitimacy, as well as a propaganda strategy…. There will always be new pandemic prevention measures… For instance, I have never been a close contact [of a person infected with COVID], but I have been labelled as a “secondary close contact (ci mijie).” I was monitored several times due to this status. “Secondary close contact” is a strange concept, but now there are many other [bizarre] labels, such as “space-time companion” (shikong bansuizhe) that refers to a person who shared the same location with a close contact, [same] meaning pertaining to the same signal station [for mobile phones and internet]. If the two of you spent more than ten minutes in that space within the scope of two hours, you will be considered a dangerous person…. I am pessimistic. These methods do not belong to people or science, they are a response to political needs.

The above statement is from Haoran, a 24-year-old man born in Shanghai who lived through the city’s infamous more than two-month long lockdown in spring 2022. Though he currently pursues a PhD degree outside of mainland China, Haoran experienced the disruptive effects of the strict pandemic policies in his hometown when he returned to visit his parents, only to find himself stuck at home for almost three months as the lockdown policies unrolled. At first, he and his parents did not believe the lockdown would happen in a cosmopolitan city such as Shanghai. Even his mother, a Party member employed in state administration, did not receive any information conclusively indicating this scenario.

Before the commencement of the lockdown, Haoran’s family did not buy enough provisions, a move they later regretted when they ran out of government-provided vegetables, as the food supply chain in the city became increasingly disrupted. Haoran was born in the late nineties to parents born in the 1970’s. Both generations grew up in the midst of China’s dynamic economic rise and global opening and had never experienced food insecurity before. Every afternoon during the lockdown, Haoran and his parents sat to have dinner and watch news reports on the state-owned TV stations. The enthusiastic reports on successful policies aiming to “fight the pandemic” (kangyi) were permeated with militaristic language that puzzled Haoran. As Haoran states:

After the tough battle is finished, we begin another war. After the war, we throw ourselves into the last battle. Is there an end to it? … They use this rhetoric to make us believe that we are in a state of war with this thing. But I don’t think such war actually exists.

The language of state-media outlets was in stark contrast with thousands of articles and posts Haoran scrolled through on WeChat and Weibo, the main social media platforms in China, sometimes compared to Facebook and Twitter. Though heavily censored, they contain dissident and critical voices that are usually erased within hours from their posting. Haoran noticed that, rather than state-promoted messages filled with positive energy (zheng nengliang), an idiom pointing to the prescriptive affective state of hope and faith in the political establishment (Iskra 2021), these accounts were often filled with gloominess and despair:

There was almost no positive news [on my WeChat and Weibo]. Every day, I would see messages about a family that was forcefully quarantined, but had an elderly relative who couldn’t walk, so they rolled him on some provisional [wheelbarrow]. Or a “square-cabin hospital” (fangcang yiyuan, a type of makeshift field hospital) that didn’t have any essential facilities but still received busses full of people. This residential complex was under lockdown, those people are starving, jumping from buildings… and so on…

The stark contrast between state-endorsed language of positivity, expressed in slogans calling for jointly fighting the common enemy of the virus, and the accounts of netizens whose pandemic-induced anxiety and depression turned them into affective aliens (Ahmed 2010), has found one of its incarnations in the online circulations of the idiom of political depression (zhengzhi yiyu or zhengzhixing yiyu). Its popularity in Chinese social media can be traced back to the article “Political Depression” written by the clinical psychologist Robert Lusson and published on HuffPost (an American progressive news website, formerly known as Huffington Post) in January 2017. According to Lusson (2017), a “politically induced depressive episode” includes the emergence or enhancement of the pre-existing symptoms of depressive disorders, such as feelings of sadness and emptiness and a continuous state of negative self-talk, which leads to the impairment of day-to-day functioning. He defines it as a clinical condition that meets the criteria for a depressive disorder, as outlined by the American Psychological Association (2022). Political depression is deeply connected to the feelings of uncertainty, loss of control, and confusion about one’s sense of reality:

Political depression may be partially driven by the fear that one may be materially harmed or socially excluded by conditions beyond one’s control. There may be an element of persecution present; thoughts that one’s government is being driven by a societal paranoia, a fear of the other and that one is the other. There may even be thoughts that one’s society is breeding feelings of inferiority for some of it’s [sic] population and that those attempts are so subtle and Machiavellian as to make one question his or her own reality. This may, in turn, create a psychically disturbing gaslight effect, the systematic attempt by a person or institution to erode another’s reality by telling them that what they are experiencing isn’t so.

While existing academic discussions of political depression are mostly linked to the sense of malaise articulated by left-leaning segments of societies in the Global North triggered by such phenomena as the rise of far-right politics (Simchon et al. 2020) or human rights abuses (Zembylas 2018), starting from 2020, the term has been gaining currency among mainland Chinese netizens. Initially, the articles circulated on Chinese social media mostly included translations of Lusson’s piece along with examples of triggers for political depression derived from the West (Bandurski 2022). Interestingly, while Lusson highlighted the need to encourage therapists to actively address the precarity and injustice embedded in larger political structures that affect their clients, instead of tracing the root of such suffering to the individual emotional mismanagement, the early Chinese translations of political depression usually left this aspect aside. Instead, they merely offered self-help advice on how to alleviate the symptoms of this disorder such as limiting media consumption, actively reaching out to friends and relatives, or acknowledging one’s limited socio-political impact (Ka233 2020). However, a peak into the comments section of one such early article posted on WeChat in February 2020 points to the growing affective dissonance between the positive state messaging and a sense of powerless depression in China crystalizing amidst the pandemic, as expressed here by a netizen nicknamed Shuguang, or Daybreak (Ka233 2020):

I am now repulsed by the news reports related to the pandemic and have completely succumbed to negative emotions. Apart from feeling anxious about getting infected, I also experience a sense of numbness coming from the suppression and exhaustion of [my] spiritual world and resentment emerging from powerlessness. Even the warm news on the pandemic that are filled with positive energy fill me with disgust. I compare them with the reality buried in my subconsciousness and I feel angry and helpless….

Haoran reported a similar experience of affective dissonance when he recalled a collective uproar among Shanghai residents when Shanghai Dragon Television (Dongfang Weishi) announced the premiere of a special program entitled “Shanghai, Add Oil!” (Shanghai, jiayou!), aimed at spreading positive energy and cheering people up amidst the strictest period of the lockdown. Celebrities were invited to perform for TV viewers, many of whom have not left their houses for weeks. The show, originally scheduled for 13 April 2022, was ultimately cancelled. Haoran speculated that it was because its organizers faced public outrage:

It was as if the officials were organizing a banquet that could feed a hundred families amidst a famine. ... As soon as the news about the show was released, everyone cursed it online. The TV station did not really censor [the comments], but they quietly cancelled the event…. In the end, it didn’t take place, but in June [after end of lockdown], they organized another event to celebrate. [They did it] to claim that that the people of Shanghai won this battle [with the virus] together, this tough battle. This is so ludicrous, since the government never officially recognized that it imposed a [city-wide] lockdown. It is all about fighting a tough battle. We don’t know how it is fought. But, hey, [sarcastic tone] everyone won, which is very good.

Starting from summer 2022, the term political depression began to spread more widely on Chinese social media. It is noteworthy to mention, it did not appear in official state media and Party announcements, pointing to its sensitive character (Bandurski 2022). The references to political depression among Chinese netizens further proliferated after the series of protests in major Chinese cities where people went to the streets to protest the strict pandemic policies and express their general dissatisfaction with the political establishment. These “blank-placard” zero-covid protests, named after the practice of carrying white sheets of paper symbolizing what is obvious but cannot be said due to state censorship, were triggered by a series of tragic events, in September, October, and November of 2022, linked to pandemic policies. These include the deadly crash of a quarantine bus in southwest China’s Guizhou province and the anti-lockdown protests in southern tech-hub city of Shenzhen, both of which occurred in September 2022. The events in September were followed by the Beijing bridge protests in October, where a banner reading “We want food, not PCR tests. We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not Cultural Revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves” was publicly displayed in the days running up to the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. In the same month, violent clashes occurred between workers and police in Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, Henan province, where 300,000 workers found themselves under state-imposed strict lockdown. In November 2022, images of maskless football fans during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar triggered anger among Chinese netizens, who asked whether China was “on the same planet” as Qatar. But the spark that set the fire was the “November 24th” incident when a fire in a residential building in Urumqi, the capital of north-western autonomous region of Xinjiang, killed ten people and injured nine. The public blamed the strict lockdown policies for hampering people’s ability to escape (Lee 2022).

Following this outpour of public anger and frustration, political depression resonated in many online posts, pointing to shared disillusionment with the pandemic policies:

The pandemic basically made us fall into collective “political depression.” Foxconn workers in Henan cannot return home, the fire in Urumqi caused heavy casualties, cross-infections occur during quarantine, there are shortages of goods, and increased burden on local governments and the resumption of production. The pandemic has caused enormous economic losses and unemployment. The unyielding [error] 404 spreads in people’s [WeChat] Moments [reference to the social media app function similar to the Facebook Wall where multiple posts are being censored, causing the readers to see such error instead of their content]. There are many physical altercations happening between residents of different neighborhoods and the pandemic prevention staff… (Zhishi Niangao Lamian 2022).

What can one do to alleviate political depression? One solution is choosing to numb one’s feelings down, as proposed by on 27 November 2022 by a Weibo user nicknamed “Self-carer for the old years” (Guanai Ziwo Yanglao Renshi):

I really feel depressed when I read the recent news related to the pandemic. Yesterday, I saw a video of a student who said that he must remain numb and calm about political news, otherwise he would succumb to political depression. I think he’s right. Sometimes, numbness is the way to deal with negative perceptions coming from society and the news. During the three years of the pandemic, I have experienced this [numbness] several times. I didn’t feel much…. Even though every day I went to work normally, doing what I should do, trying to live a life like before, walking through the streets, I felt depressed and confused about the future…

Numbness as an anhedonic response to the crippling (post-)pandemic political realities was reported by many Chinese citizens. On 6 December 2022, a Weibo user nicknamed “There are stars all over the world” shared:

Recently, under the tide of bad news, political depression quietly crept in, so I felt disappointed and suffocated with “emo” [English word used here] emotions. It seems that along with the loss of physical freedom in the past three years, the freedom of the mind has also become narrower and narrower…. To prevent the immune system from collapsing, I could only partially numb [myself]…. The biggest imprint the pandemic had on my life in the past few years is that my creativity, action, and passion have all declined significantly, [same goes for my] curiosity and the desire to explore…. Every day, I must remind myself: don’t be numb, don’t be numb.

On 7 December 2022, Chinese state authorities announced a gradual easing of the zero-covid policy. The most important changes included significantly reducing the requirements related to COVID testing and digital health codes in daily life. Digital health passes, generated by apps developed by major local technological companies for Chinese government, will no longer be required to enter most buildings or public transportation, despite concerns raised by critics who worried they will forever remain part of the country’s elaborate surveillance system (Shepherd and Li 2022). On 13 December 2022, the digital travel code that enabled tracking people’s cross-city travels went out of service (Xinhua 2022). Will the pandemic soon end in China, despite the concerns raised by Haoran in the opening paragraph? Will political depression cease to be a hot term to describe a sense of profound sadness and helplessness triggered by disillusionment and distrust in the body politic, especially among young, educated Chinese, many of whom have travelled abroad and rely on VPN software to compare post-pandemic realities in different parts of the world? The recent blank placard protests revealed a profound sense of alienation from the state’s affective regime of positivity that point to pandemic policies as just the tip of an iceberg of dissatisfaction with the political establishment. This being the case, political depression may continue to linger.

References 

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.

American Psychological Association. 2022. “Depression.” 

Bandurski, David. 2022. “Political Depression.” China Media Project. 5 October. 

Guanai Ziwo Yanglao Renshi. 2022. Weibo. 27 November. 

Iskra, Anna. 2021. “Chinese New Age milieu and the Emergence of Homo Sentimentalis in the People’s Republic.” China Information 35 (1): 89–108.

Ka233. 2020. “Women de zhengzhi yiyu (Our political depression).” Ciniao qixi di. WeChat. 4 February. 

Lee, Peter, 2022. “Timeline: Key dates in China’s ‘Blank Placard’ Zero-Covid Protests.” Hong Kong Free Press. 30 November. https://hongkongfp.com/2022/11/30/timeline-key-dates-in-chinas-blank-placard-zero-covid-protests/.

Lusson, Robert. 2022. “Political Depression.” HuffPost. 16 January. 

Shepherd, Christian and Li, Lyric. 2022. “China Eases Covid Testing and Health-Pass Rules in Wake of Protests.” The Washington Post. 7 December. 

Simchon, Almog, Guntuku, Sharath Chandra, Simhon, Rotem, Ungar, Lyle H., Hassin, Ran R., and Gilead, Michael. 2020. “Political Depression? A Big-Data, Multimethod Investigation of Americans’ Emotional Response to the Trump Presidency.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149 (11): 2154–2168.

There Are Stars All Over the World. 2022. Weibo. 6 December. 

Xinhua. 2022. “China to End Use of Digital Travel Code Starting Tuesday.” China Daily. 12 December. 

Zembylas, Michalinos. 2018. “Political Depression, Cruel Optimism and Pedagogies of Reparation: Questions of Criticality and Affect in Human Rights Education.” Critical Studies in Education 15 (1): 1–17.

Zhishi Niangao Lamian. 2022. “Zhengzhixing yiyu. Corona gunchu diqiu! (Political depression. Corona, get out of this planet!).” WeChat. 26 November. 

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