Relevance: Sociology: Social Control; & G.S paper I: Society and social issues
Context
China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighbourhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.
The goal of the government is to separate millions of people away from each other’s including their closed kins. SOCIAL CONTROL in such situation can raise a critical situation for a family and individuals under any grieve situation may leave family and individuals helpless, this may cost families with emotional behaviour towards individuals, according to the ‘Black Sheep effect’, people are more severe with a deviant when they share their social identity than when he is a member of an out-group.
While Social Control effects positively in case of health behaviour, as per various findings highlighted social control and the processes could be associated to self-related motivations that can encourage people to defend themselves from their group’s norms.
Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature log their movements, oversee quarantines and most important keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.
Residential lockdowns of varying strictness from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan where the virus was first reported.
Such large extend state control on such large population may bring out positive as well as negative sociological outputs, but initially sociological studies are interested in how the state emerged through time and space, and how the state is socially constructed and constituted through various social mechanisms, power relations, and relationships of inequality.
Sociology is equally attentive to how the state maintains its capacity to rule through modes of governance and govern mentality, bureaucratic apparatuses, networks, institutions, and organizations, and to struggles between groups for control of state hegemony.
In case of china where communism is a pro active form of government this may affect the state negatively, as many other states such as France and Italy have also came up with protective measures but lock down was not an option.
Demand for a democratic setup in china is active since decade long this demand may further accelerate.
Such extreme steps could lead to DE civilization on society in long run, there is no set time period for cure and control of epidemic which has occurred naturally so disconnecting cities and buildings from each other may have negative repercussions on social balance. State control on pharmacies selling analgesics and seek treatments on in hospitals may have further aggravated the effect and influence of epidemic, not allowing public gathering complete control on daily activities has made china a vast patchwork of fiefs
Again state control on society has positive results in case of health issues although it is unknown how much Chinese administration and government are able to control the epidemic but still such measures have largely controlled the spread across China.
All in all they preferred methods by Chinese governments seems to be sociologically unsustainable in long run there has to be a continuous state support and life should go in normalcy, locking down has further accelerated the panic in society all around which may definitely de-civilise the society Wuhan the most effect part may get disconnected from rest on china in minds of people family members of people who suffered the effect of virus may face boycott the govt should have tackled the situation in a more liberalized and a cooperative way.
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