According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, biopolitics is defined as “politics concerned with influencing environmental public policy and decision-making”. French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault is widely associated with this term and he claims that “biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (Source). Foucault provides examples of biopolitical control including “ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population”, meaning that a real life example of biopolitics would be China’s former one-child policy. Biopolitics were also very relevant in the Middle Ages times in which the world was ruined with pandemics and no modern medicine to cure it. Enter 2020, where we have cutting-edge medicines and health care services, and yet the Coronavirus manages to complicate biopolitical strategies.
There are many applications to the word virus. If a video goes viral on social media that means that it is really popular and it has around spread the internet very quickly. Computer viruses are designed to spread from host to host and can replicate itself quite easily. One might argue that human beings themselves are viral in certain ways. A virus depends on a host in order to survive and multiply/spread to others. Cells are basic structures of all living organisms, and they group together to form tissues and organs. Cells are hijacked within a human body by a virus and are then spread to other bodies. In a biopolitical sense, you could argue that humans are like viruses because of how quickly we can reproduce and spread across the globe. It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world population to reach 1 billion people, yet it only took 200 more years to reach 7 billion people (Source).
The virus metaphor can be found in our national political life. Our president is very prolific when it comes to Twitter, which is a social media platform that can make ideas go viral quicker than any other app. As COVID-19 started spreading a couple months ago, Trump used his thumbs to tweet about political rivals, his enemies, friends. He spoke about how the virus was an overreaction created by so-called “Fake News”, and even exploited the virus to make biopolitical claims about immigrants and people of different races. His claim that the border wall will stop coronavirus is not factual as “research has shown that travel bans in general have limited impact on slowing the spread of disease unless transmission is also on the the decline within a community itself” (Wired). The wall between the US-Mexico border is extremely irrelevant in the time of the pandemic, and it is honestly the last thing that American workers need to be pouring their sweat and labor into. It is important to consider the racism and unfairness that certain countries have been shown in the US, with the number one victim of hate speech being China. According to Politico, “Trump has repeatedly promoted the administration’s move in late January to bar entry from foreign nationals who had recently been in China and institute a mandatory two-week quarantine for U.S. citizens returning from the epicenter of the outbreak”. Trump was recently asked in a press conference about calling COVID-19 the Chinese virus, and he continues to defend the use of the offensive term. Al Jazeera reports that Trump said that “It’s not racist at all” and “It comes from China, that’s why.” Labeling the virus in such a way can only result in bad things happening: more tension, more xenophobia, more racial slurs, and more physical abuse against Asian-Americans.
Asian Globalization 