I. Introduction: Echoes of Jiaozhounese

Jiaozhounese.

I forgot how to speak this very dialect of my own, just like Uyghurs forgot how to speak Uyghur and Chinese Koreans forgot how to speak Korean. The syllables that once rolled off my tongue now feel foreign, distant or "dirty"[1], as if they belonged to someone else. In The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller explores how feelings of disgust are not only the visceral reactions[2] but also powerful social tools that enforce cultural hierarchies. It’s not strange then, how a very mother-toned language or dialect[3], something so central to my identity, can gradually slip away even without attentions it deserves to have; this region-specific attribute becomes an intentionally institutionalized casualty of migrations and assimilations and internally disgusting object. My grandparents, who spoke Jiaozhounese fluently and not some level of Mandarin, would tell me stories when I was a little kid. My parents, who spoke both Jiaozhounese and Mandarin fluently, would serve as interpreters and the bridge between me and my grandparents. I now only speak Mandarin, some dialects of Beijing and English; Jiaozhounese is a language that now feels as elusive as a fading dream for me.

I also forgot I once had a slender braid with me, for a long time of twelve years. I was questioned more than hundreds of times, I believe, that if I am a Manchu myself. I am not. My braid was merely a symbol of an ancient tradition from my Jiaozhou village that can be traced back to Dongyi (Eastern Barbarians, by Han), where boys kept their hair braided until the age of twelve to ward off misfortune. This had brought me various misunderstandings, curious, sometimes eerie stares, probably because we lived in a such homogenous, collective and unitary society. That's probably why my memory had almost selectively lowered and erased all relevance to Jiaozhounese, and I had almost forgotten that I had kept a thin yet long braid once. When I found it again, it was dry and yellow like our assimilated and siphoned off rural culture wrapped in a red envelope.

What I didn't forget was my name—Gan (淦), as it was reminded quote often, even now. It’s a name with deep roots, named after a river that has sustained my ancestors for generations, a name that carries the weight of my heritage and the belief of a fortune-teller who insisted that the character "Gan (淦)" would balance the metal (金) elements in my future life. But in the city, no one cared about such "superstitious ancient beliefs". They only heard and replaced that with "Gan (干)," the homophone for a word that the internet has turned into a crude curse[4]. So, when I introduced myself, the reaction was often a mix of confusion and smirks. I wanted to explain, to defend the beauty and meaning of my name, but the words always got tangled in my throat, blocked by the fear of more judgments.

What is truly unsettling is not just the loss of a dialect, a custom, an interpretation of character, but the layers of fears, controls and silence that prompted such a loss.

The pressures that my family and I would eventually have after leaving our rural village—where Jiaozhounese was the lifeblood for communication—initially went unnoticed by me. Opportunities were what the city promised and granted, and with them, we, and many others, had to let go of huge parts of ourselves to sustain life[5]. Our dialect turned into the first casualty in this process: one for sacrifice on the altar of urbanization and conformation[6]. Looking back, one may realize just how this wasn't simply a loss as a byproduct of migration, but indeed one of the politics of fear that stipulate who we become when parts of our identity get left behind.

The essay is an exploration of those " Biopolitics of Fear and Cultural Erosions" in the context of internal migrations in China. I hope to show, through the lens of biopolitics and analysis of Hukou, a pathway into the strategic construction and utilization of fear in shaping societal attitude and policy toward those deemed outsiders—like the typical Ethnic Minorities of Uyghurs and those "Non-typical Minorities" like my families and the 600 million rural residents that are often times underrepresented.

II. The Hukou System Under a Biopolitical Framework

The hukou system, put in place during the 1950s[7], is a deep illustration of how biopolitical governance works in China. While it functions as a household registration system, it is also a device for ranking people into rigid social hierarchies between rural and urban status. This system runs deep into issues like access to social services (pensions etc.)[8], education, and job opportunities in this way, hence guaranteeing that the urban-rural divide remains at the heart and as one of the constant features of Chinese society. (Chan & Buckingham, 2008).

Biopolitics refers to strategies and mechanisms of management of human life processes by regimes of power. Biopolitical strategies are different from the other or earlier forms or simply tradiational forms of power, as this does not enable it through overt control or legal mandate. Instead, its process runs through administration and regulation of population. In other words, biopolitics is the system through which pervasive state control operates on the "biological" features of life—health, reproduction, mortality, living conditions of populations—and leverages them for the exertion of influence and control.

From the contemporary era, Foucault expressed that biopolitics was developed in the particular moment as the nation-state and the emergence of new epistemes, most particularly in the life sciences. It constitutes a shift from sovereign power, which is primarily about the right to take life, to the forms of power that are focused on fostering life, ensuring that populations are healthy and productive. In his view, biopolitics is not expressed through the disciplining of the bodies of individuals straightway but through the management of the conditions in which they live, subtly permeating techniques that would mold their behavior and opportunities in life.

According to Thomas Lemke, building on the work of Foucault, biopolitics is a new form of political reason deeply entangled with the treatment of life itself. He points out that biopolitics is indeed so linked with the optimization of life processes that the state actively intervenes in the interest of its population by controlling and enhancing vitality in such areas as public health, reproduction, and social welfare. It is not only a regulation about disease control or birth rate management but extends to the very structuring of society with policies affecting residence, access to resources, and social mobility.

In the hukou system of China, biopolitics comes out in the way the state uses it to classify and manage its population. The state regulates access to disposable services and business opportunities by categorizing all the citizens into either urban or rural hukou statuses. This categorization serves towards the definition of life opportunities and, hence, social and economic outcomes. The main disadvantages that rural hukou holders suffer include poor access to quality healthcare and education, poor health outcomes, and a lower level of social mobility than their urban counterparts.

Lemke argues that this is possible by making it appear natural and normal for these distinctions and classifications to have to exist, effectively rendering the inequalities that this form of system decorates possible. In being a case of biopolitical control, the hukou system does more than simply administer a population; it fashions conditions of living to privilege some and disfavor others. This process is what Foucault called the "government of life," whereby the state derives its power not in terms of actual control but in terms of managing life processes at the social level.

Moreover, biopolitics is closely aligned to governmentality, the second key idea developed by Foucault. Governmentality refers to the ensemble of practices and different techniques through which the state governs populations; it is not simply a matter of legal and sovereign power but extends over a wide array of practices impinging on individual conduct. In this sense, the hukou system is a visible manifestation of governmentality in which the state organizes itself through a system in order to effectively settle and discipline the population in the ways of life and action.

These concepts, according to Lemke, are pointing to how hukou illustrates two important things: the state's ability to control its population through the regulation of life processes, and the ability of the state to control the population through the normalization of these controls. With hukou related to the management of the access of opportunities and resources, the state is then underwriting that the hukou system consolidates itself into the social construction and thereby reassures the available social hierarchies and inequalities.

In the theory of Foucault and developed further by Lemke, biopolitics is power exercising discourse over regulation as to life in itself. It operates through the regularization of populations, exerting influence over their biological and social living conditions. This biopolitical control, in the case of the hukou system, deals with the classification and regulation of the lives of the people by the state, based on their hukou status, which would determine the probability of this person's life. This deeply embedded system within the governmentality framework categorically indicates how the state uses biopolitical strategies in the perpetuation and reproduction of social division so that some groups remain privileged while others are pushed further into the periphery.

The act of situating the hukou system within the said theoretical frameworks can better grasp the ins and outs relative to its acting as an instrument of state control, which, through the subtle management of the process of life and not direct force, molds the lives of the subjects. It gives an understanding of the many ways that state power is exhibited toward citizens, and it establishes and entrenches social inequalities while engineering life itself in manners that will have sweeping effects on society at large, including those of material and psychic costs.

My own personal impact from the hukou system in my life exemplifies well how deep a biopolitical influence it can have. Growing up in a rural village in Jiaodong, my rural hukou designation did not simply stand as a bureaucratic label; rather, it was something actually marking one's position within a rigid social hierarchy, sequentially inviting one to consider all sorts of other opportunities and limitations right from birth. This label reminded me constantly of my status as a "second-class citizen" in the eyes of the urban elites[9]. My trip to Qingdao really opened up the city for me, which has then brought out fiercely harsh realizations from this biopolitical control. My accent, appearance, even my name singled me out as different, someone who did not belong in the urban fabric. The power of the hukou system consists in naturalizing these distinctions, making them seem an inherent part of the social order and not the result of deliberate state policy.

The impacts of the hukou system are far from mere individual experiences. More than being a bureaucratic tool, it can control life itself and plunge spirals of poverty and marginalization deep within rural populations. It incarnates what Foucault has called biopower: state control exercised over populations by regulating mobility and resources. As Kristensen (2020) very pointedly underlines, "Control in this case is not about the management of physical movement but about ruling on the potential of people to better their social and economic conditions." After all, the real brutality of the hukou system does not lie in that it restricts the freedom of physical movement but in that it greatly helps to extinguished the possibility of social and economic uplifting, locking the individual into predefined paths of existence that would benefit the country and party.

The hukou system is also a device of surveillance and differentiation, characteristic elements of governmentality as expounded by Foucault as it is something "allowing the state to 'observe, record, and classify' individuals". Its design enables the state to monitor and oversee populations through a complex web of documentation, classification, and surveillance. Each citizen is labeled, and their life is subsequently recorded from birth—their hukou status determining what resources and opportunities they are allowed. Hukou makes possible constant surveillance, thus creating some forms of what I called the "statistical citizenship" [10]wherein citizens are made visible and governable through their statuses. The state's ability to monitor and control movement, particularly of rural populations, also ensures that undesirable or "risky" groups[11] are kept on the periphery—both literally and figuratively (Bray, 2005).

The state's utilization of the hukou as an instrument of economic control further reinforces its biopolitical implications. As Greenhalgh and Winckler clearly pointed out, the hukou system was first an integral part of China's broader strategy for economic development, particularly during the socialist period when industrialization at the expense of rural areas was priority for this country. The hukou system has been used to limit rural populations' mobility so that urban areas may enjoy low labor costs without actually incurring the costs of provision for social services to such workers. This then created a wide divide between the urban and rural populations, in which the former enjoyed state-sponsored welfare and the latter were deprived of such resources.

Furthermore, this is another huge element that the hukou system has not only survived but moved into the neoliberal era, continuing to fulfill its function of serving state interests by controlling labor mobility and maintaining social stability. The differentiation between urban and rural hukou holders has contributed to building a dual labor market in which rural migrants provide the 'labor force' for China's economic growth but are denied the social and economic privileges of their urban counterparts. It is justified as a necessary systemic inequality by the state that offers guarantees for economic efficiency and political stability, and a stipulation that carries the biopolitical logic that underpins the hukou system (Chan & Buckingham, 2008).

III. Affective Politics and the Construction of Fear

Fear of the unknown and of difference has always been a perennial tool in the hands of those who seek to exert control and shore up social boundaries. The hukou system plays an instrumental role in the many ways the Chinese state uses affective politics: fear mobilized to justify repressive policies aiming at maintaining social order. This kind of fear does not correspond to spontaneous sentiment; rather, it is constructed and perpetuated by proper actors in order to enforce the divide between rural and urban populations.

The difference was quite palpable and obvious to a child, my darker skin, rural accent, and cultural markers of heritage were all sources of anxiety—not just mine but for those around me who saw them as backward or at best indicating uncivilized origins.[12] This was systematically driven home by the hukou system, which institutionalized the idea that rural populations are outsiders in the urban landscape.

The hukou system is a biopolitical tool in terms of how it can make one fearful through rigid classification and restriction. For rural migrants, the fear of being ostracized from opportunities realized in urban life is an important motivator toward conformation to urban norms. This fear is further enhanced by the discrimination rural migrants face in limited access to resources and social acceptance. It reflects a broader fear that one is doomed to be marginalized in a rapidly modernizing society unless one sheds rural identities through speaking standard Mandarin and adopting city customs.

Sara Ahmed’s (2014) exploration of the politics of fear is particularly relevant here. Ahmed argues that fear is not just an emotion but a mechanism that shapes the boundaries of communities, defining who belongs and who does not. In the context of China, the hukou system uses fear to draw a clear line between the urban and the rural, the modern and the backward. This fear-driven boundary not only dictates where people can live but also who they are allowed to become, reinforcing a social order and hierarchy that privileges urban identities over rural ones.

IV. The Loss of Identity: Cultural Erosion as Biopolitical Control

Language and culture destruction is not an individual tragedy but a really intended result from the biopolitical ruling over rural migrants. In fact, pushing urbanization and modernization in China has resulted in the erosion of linguistic and cultural diversity, where regional dialects and traditions are devalued for only one official homogeneous variety.

My native Jiaozhounese dialect has faded—the loss of it a microcosm of this broader process. The hukou system reinforces this cultural wearing away through an assimilationist logic into a homogenized urban culture. Rural people who migrate to cities are often forced to reject their cultural practices in return for a city way of life, driven by systemic discrimination devaluing rural identities in favor of an idealized urban identity. Assimilation is colored deeply by the biopolitical strategies of the state, which are oriented toward creating a single and united national identity at the expense of regional and cultural-diversity entities (Han, 2013).

The concept of biopower introduced by Foucault brings out this relevance very clearly. Foucault argues that under biopower, a system of regulation controlling the population via management of life processes is initiated and maintained. Perhaps one of the most important mechanisms exercising biopower in contemporary China is the hukou system because it dictates not only where people reside and work but also ways of living and styles of being. In encouraging a homogenized urban culture and pejorizing rural customs and mores, state control over the cultural identities of persons ensures these individuals are put through the ethos of what it means to be Chinese, wherein there is only one standard otherwise unitary vision is maintained.

The erosion of cultural identity is not just a loss for the person as an individual; it is a loss to the nation as a whole. Whereas there existed richness in languages, traditions, and cultural practices that thrived earlier in China (even within Han, there are Dongyi, Hakka, etc…), these are now being supplanted by such narrow and homogenized vision of what constitutes 'being Chinese'. Indeed, the vision is marked by intimate intertwinement with the state's biopolitical strategies aimed at management and control of the population through promotion of one single unified national identity at the cost of regional and cultural diversity. Such loss of cultural identity, therefore, is not a factor that results from migration but is the expression of a power of the state and public over life itself[13]. The overemphasis on urbanization and modernity by the state results in marginalization of people who do not conform to these ideals and thereby erases the cultural difference within the country itself. The institution of social and economic barriers through the hukou system reinforces this process as it constrains rural migrants (which often times carry the most authentic heritages from various places and regions in China) from assimilating into urban life while maintaining their cultural identities.

Map 1: Dialects in China (Detailed)[14]

Map 2: Dialects in China (Simplified)[15][16]

Minority Populations: The Case of the Uyghurs

While it projects deep into rural Han Chinese, the depth to which it impacts ethnic minorities—the Uyghurs, in particular—further problematizes or adds nuances into the governance of China with biopolitical traits. The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group concentrated in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This population has been subject to strict scrutiny, surveillance, and cultural assimilation policies, most of them moving beyond the mechanisms applied to the Han rural populations as they are often times not being considered "dirt" but potential " 'security threats."

It is, according to Roberts, "securitized biopolitics" that the Chinese government has been implementing against the Uyghurs since 2009. It literally treats the whole of the Uyghur population as probable security trouble spots needing management rather than just subjects to be ruled. This has manifested in various ways, such as mass surveillance technologies, the foundation of re-education camps, and tight controls over religious or cultural practices (Roberts, 2020).

It is the functions of language playing through this dynamic. Much like the erosion of the Jiaozhounese dialect among rural migrants, so too does the Uyghur language and cultural practices fall under severe threat. Government policies have increasingly given promotion to Mandarin Chinese as the primary language of instruction in schools at the cost of marginalizing the Uyghur language and intricately "diluting" cultural identity (Byler, 2018). It is a tool for Uyghur linguistic assimilation into the dominant Han culture and effectively erases the unique ethnic identity of Uyghurs.

Moreover, biopolitical control is extended toward reproductive rights or the "reproductive governance", using China Officials' terms. The Chinese government has been accused of implementing policies aimed at decreasing the birth rate among the Uyghurs and other minorities by way of forced sterilizations and rigorous birth control measures (Zenz, 2020). Some are implicit and seem not to be getting attentions as other obvious aspects might get. This represents perhaps an extreme phenomenon of biopower at work: direct controls over the existence of a population[17] [18].

The Uyghurs present a more blatant and oppressive form of biopolitical governance against a minority population. While rural Han migrants face systemically blocked opportunities and cultural erosion, policies toward the Uyghurs pose explicit threats to physical and cultural survival. Hence, this example shows how biopolitics works on the crossroads of ethnicity, religion, and state security.

V. Conclusion

The hukou system and the state's biopolitical practices have been deeply inscribed not only in my life agendas pertaining to residence and work but have also immensely influenced who I could become. It is in this essay that I make efforts to delve deep into the material formations of fear underlying these practices and, with critical insight, illustrate how they support and entrench social boundaries, reinforce discrimination, and add to the erosion of cultural identities.

Yet this is not just a story of loss, but also one of resilience. Pressures—the unconscionable ones to abandon my rural identity and forget my roots—hit me hard, yet right now, they are getting stronger for the preservation and protection of cultural diversity defining China. Reclaiming my Jiaozhounese dialect, recalling my ancestors' traditions, is resistance against the reigning powers of biopolitical control that have been grown over with decades and years to come, no checks are there so far, but the forces are rising and there will be, I believe.

The dirt that used to get stuck on my shoes and made me ashamed of has instantly built itself into a base on which I stand, building a future that can respect the past but, in some ways, pave new ways for those like me, who forged themselves into something amid the forces of biopolitical control. This journey of cultural identity reclamation and preservation, therefore, belies to greater themes across the course, most especially through those ways in which fear and biopolitical governance shape experiences for migrants and other marginalized communities.

The stories of my ancestors, the dialects that are fading, and the cultural practices that are being lost—all are not merely relics of a bygone eras; they bear testament to how people refuse to be homogenized all the way through the ongoing deletions, censorships and oppressions. I treat this piece as an elegy somehow, for my village, my culture and my identity—and it isn't anything dirty or anything of mourning, at most, it was the defiant resilience in the silent land where no one actually sees the "silent majority”.

Chart 1. From Chinese Labor Annual Book, 2024.

(Black line for rural residents; they were often unseen and unrecognized)

VI. References

Anagnost, A. (1997). National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.

Bray, D. (2005). Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform. Stanford University Press.

Byler, D. (2018). Spirit Breaking: Uyghur Dispossession, Culture Work, and Terror Capitalism in a Chinese Global City. Public Culture, 30(2), 309-336.

Chan, K., & Buckingham, W. W. (2008). Is China Abolishing the Hukou System? The China Quarterly, 195, 582-606.

De León, J. (2015). The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press.

Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. Picador.

Greenhalgh, S. (2009). The Chinese Biopolitical: Facing the Twenty-First Century. New Genetics and Society, 28(3), 205-222.

Greenhalgh, S., & Winckler, E. A. (2005). Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford University Press.

Han, S. (2013). Language Policy, and Chinese Language Learning in the West: Myths and Realities. Routledge.

Kristensen, P. (2020). The Hukou System and Internal Migration in China: A Biopolitical Analysis. Master's Thesis, University of Copenhagen.

Roberts, S. R. (2020). The Biopolitics of China's "War on Terror" and the Exclusion of the Uyghurs. Critical Asian Studies, 52(2), 221-240.

Smith Finley, J. (2019). Securitization, Insecurity and Conflict in Contemporary Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-Terrorism Evolved into State Terror? Central Asian Survey, 38(1), 1-26.

Zenz, A. (2020). Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang. The Jamestown Foundation.

VII. Endnote:

[1] Dirty here should refer to "土气" in Mandarin, which basically means unpopular, lower-leveled or uncivilized. In The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller examines how disgust works as a social function to ensure that cultural hierarchies and norms are upheld. The application of "dirty" to my native dialect reflects a broader societal tendency to stigmatize and marginalize nondominant cultures and languages, thus leading to their erosion. Such feelings of disgust are explained and analyzed by Miller, who shows how they are internalized and lead to distancing from one's cultural heritage in an effort to blend into dominant society.

[2] Visceral reactions are deep, instinctive, sometimes automatic responses that individuals have to stimuli, particularly language and cultural symbols. The feeling here—Jiaozhounese has become "dirty" or "uncivilized"—is a visceral reaction. Such feelings are probably the result of internalized social norms and cultural values. These are absolutely not cognitive judgments but instinctive feelings of revulsion that have been more deeply ingrained over time. The "curious, sometimes eerie stares" which this cultural symbol of my braid elicits reflect visceral reactions driven by societal expectations for uniformity and unease with behavior that is deviant. These social norms are, therefore, internalized and cause automatic responses—almost unconscious ones—that culminate in distancing away from part of one's cultural heritage. The need is to understand those visceral reactions in the explanation of the process of cultural erosion and assimilation, for they bring to light just how deeply social conditioning interferes with emotional responses to cultural identity.

[3] Depending on criteria to distinguish the two concepts. See Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960, How to Distinguish Languages and Dialects and Language and dialect in China.

[4] This is also under the context of CCP's censorships on Internet, where no one is allowed to say explicitly the cruse words. However, due to various homophones Chinese has, the signifier soon changes while left the signified unchanged. If the new signifier has many people affected or related, it often time doesn't last long. Gan (淦) here is different cause hardly do people outside my hometown have names that incorporate this character. Gan(淦) refers to meanings like "fuck" or "shit" then become a common sense among netizens.

[5] This would be interesting to analyze if comparing South China and North China. Take Cantonese as an example here, not only would some people insist its status as an official "language" (including many foreigners and people in power) but also this dialect sometimes exclude people and give certain groups advantages and privileges over others. If one is to trip to Hong Kong, two best languages to speak would be English and Cantonese, even orthodox and authentic Mandarin sometimes would incur disgust and disrespect, not to mention Northern dialects/languages like Jiaozhounese.

[6] I would like to add upon the discussions of why Chinese people are so sick of the "authentic accent", especially for English speaking. One in China would be ashamed to talk in English if he/she/they doesn't have the proper standard American or British Accent (Received Pronunciation). Others would also be more likely to judge upon the accents if not shocking contents. Foreigners come to visit China may also observe such situations that parents forced their kids to talk to them in order to "practice" the young being's social abilities as well as language proficiency. This could mean something negative though: ones without the typical "Asian Face" can't, or basically would never be able to, integrate into Chinese society. One English teacher of mine (with Canadian roots but married in China) once complained to me about how people around him still regarded him as 老外("the foreigner" ) despite his native-level Mandarin. It would be hard to say if this situation is a long-lasting impact from Qian Long (One early Qing Emperor)'s policies to shut China's door from the outside world, CCP's very efforts to attract foreign currency when that door just opened again, or simply the fact that China is a largely homogenous country with 92% Han.

[7] Specifically, July 16, 1951, the Ministry of Public Security promulgated and put into effect the Interim Regulations on the Administration of Urban Households. I also have research on how this affects Chinese society during and after the Great Leap Forward times.

[8] See Chart 1. for visualizing differences.

[9] In this place, education even serves to emphasize this stratifications. When I was in Qingdao it was better cause Jiaozhou is a rural area nearby, however, things change dramatically when I came to Beijing for studying as most of the times honors are not eligible to me as I didn't have 学籍 (students' documents) as a result of my lack of Beijing Hukou. I also can't attend public schools to attend Gaokao.

[10] The concept of statistical citizenship involves rendering citizens visible, legible, and governable by the state, through the collection and analysis of demographic and statistical data (which is fairly easy given the context is in China where privacy of citizens, in practice, is not well protected in front of the governments and law executives). It summarizes with regard to the hukou system how classification and control based on the status of every individual permeates through their whole life course, from access to education and health to experience in the labor market. This actually makes a citizen a statistic in the governance scheme, whereas her value and opportunities lie not in her own qualities or promise but in her statistical profile. In this connection, statistical citizenship focuses on the way identity is reduced to a mere database entry and is useful to the state in managing, controlling, and discriminating among populations. This control mechanism ensures that specific groups, or mainly those perceived to be undesirable and "at risk," are marginalized in both spatial and social aspects in very systematic ways. Court in this very way, marginality consistently undergirds the biopolitical strategies of exclusion and inequality.

[11] Various news were once reported emphasizing the potential risks and crimes peasant-workers can commit (like raping, murder, stealing etc...) so that urban citizens don't "waste their empathy" and are entitled to care less about or even neglect rural people without feeling guilty.

[12] Speaking of this, an anecdote would be I was once considered "mute" due to I didn't speak one word for a month back to my elemental school in Qingdao. I didn't know how to speak Mandarin then, and I was somehow "silent".

[13] Cultural Revolution, for example, would serve as a good explanation of the goal of government to reach a Socialist China without notable differences across the space or " fetters and chains" from our past.

[14] http://chinesedialectgeography.jp/

[15] See how Jiaozhounese is classified as Mandarin as less people spoke them. The regions usually were controlled by governments more thoroughly with a longer history. (Core regions)

[16] Current link of reference as the original database needs IP access: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17qsbxw/map_of_chinese_languages_varieties_of_chinese_in/

[17] One Child Policy for Han somehow serves in the similar manner.

[18] Recent changes to the marriage and divorce policies in China that relaxed marriage controls but at the same time tightened divorce cases by incorporating a mandatory "cooling-off" period are testament that the state continues to exert biopolitical control over the population. These can be seen as tactics within a more general strategy of dealing with social stability and demographic issues by affecting personal and familial decisions. A case in point is the "cooling-off" period before divorce, which is a biopolitical tool to the effect of reducing cases of divorce in order to secure the family as a strategy to securing social order. It works in tandem with the state's continuous attempts to control the life processes of its subjects, guiding them subtly toward conduct and life decisions that serve larger governmental goals. Such policies underline how a state relies on bio-political strategies in management, not only of a population at large but also of the most intimate aspects of citizens' lives, further entrenching the power of a state within the structure of personal and social relationships.