The Red Workers: An Intensified Politics and Poetics of Electrical Power Supply during the Hubei Lockdown

This thesis examines the distinct politics and poetics of the electrical power supply workers in the context of China's containment of COVID during its domestic outbreak from January to April 2020 in Hubei – the epicenter of both the COVID outbreak and the state's initial anti-epidemic actions. In response to the COVID outbreak, the state launched a power supply campaign, mobilizing the electrical workers to conduct intensive emergency cabling, wiring, and troubleshooting, and even taking up tasks other than power supply to do community disease prevention work, acting as and assuming responsibilities of grassroots cadres. In following these front-line power workers who participated in this campaign fervently and whose laboring bodies enabled the steady flow of both electrical and political forms of power, this thesis reveals how the grassroots "redness" animated in those workers is more an ever-shifting field of emergence reverberating with other discursive and material forces in their immediate techno-political, social, and ethical worlds than a single, fixed abstraction signifying patriotism and the loyalty to the party-state. It also shows that what we think of as a single object as electricity is a heterogeneous and multiplied thing that flows differently, moving from a physical force recalcitrant to sensory perception and linguistic capture to a political spectacle when its seamless flow (or lack thereof) is event-ified, from a materialized instantiation of the social fervor around the nation-state to an ethical peg through which both familial and collective relationships and intimacy are made and remade.