When "Total War" Joins "People's War": China's recent surge of biopolitics and its repercussions in internet poetry

In the People's Republic of China (PRC) the long denial of an epidemic threat by the authorities led to hectic actions in late January 2020. Soon after, this official political activism resulted in a biopolitical campaign under the direct leadership of the Communist Party's (henceforth Party) Central Committee. Paramount leader Xi Jinping, in domestic speeches as well as in international communication, set out a rhetoric of war, the impact of which was not only perceived in Western public discourse, but felt even more pervasively in the language ofPRC mainstream media. This essay argues that lyrical Internet poetry in China, which is a popular genre of communication that vehemently responds to public incidents, takes up the new biopolitics and bioethics proclaimed by party organs and mainstream media and translates it into a more intellectual idiom. The function of lyrical Internet poetry as a contemporary social institution will be highlighted. After that, I will present and discuss five poems partly found and accessed via Chinese websites and partly received through direct communication with authors of the online-poetry scene. These texts starkly differ from each other in terms of their literary quality and, while the authors of the first two seem to be occasional writers and more or less committed to reasserting official discourse, those of the last two poems are outstanding figures in the context of internet literature as one of the PRC's officially not recognized subcultures, heavily censored under pandemic conditions. My analysis of the language of recent poetic texts composed in response to the public mobilization for a "total war" and "people's war" will largely rely on translation methods developed over the years in previous works on classical premodern as well as on modern and contemporary classicist Chinese poetry. I will demonstrate both the vulnerability and the subversive potential of poetic language in coping with authoritarian biopolitics.