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AbstractSince the successful containment of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late March 2020, China had implemented a nationwide highly stringent and restrictive zero-COVID policy to manage the pandemic until the sudden swift away from it in early December 2022. How did the Chinese Communist Party discursively construct it as a 'normal' and legitimate policy? Using interpretivism and poststructuralist political theory, this paper examines how Chinese political elites constructed a discourse of danger for the COVID pandemic, with the dominant discursive narratives full of xenophobic and nationalist languages. The discourse framed 'foreigners' as 'threats' to Chinese people's health, advocated that China should rely on home-made vaccines and medicines and, more importantly, argued that the Chinese Communist rule demonstrates 'institutional superiority' over Western governance. This xenophobic and nationalist discourse has lingered on after the dismantling of the zero-COVID policy. There are grounds for us to concern whether China is seeking self-reliance rather than integrating itself with the world. A Chinese decoupling from the world—a nationalist self-reliance policy similar with that in the Mao era—is not unthinkable.

This article analyses the intergenerational mobility of the Chinese "new middle class" in Shanghai, China. Building on the Bourdieusian concept of social capital, it puts forward a sociocultural approach to explaining the reproduction of the middle class in contemporary urban China. It explores why cultural capital and marketable professional qualification are not enough for younger members of this class to secure their class status and upward mobility. It also discusses how and why the pre-reform socialist social institutions of danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) continue to play decisive roles in consolidating the middle class' life status in post-reform China. This study finds that middle-class parents capitalise on their accrued and privileged guanxi (interpersonal relationship), built on the socialist social institutions, to help their children find good jobs to maintain their own upward intergenerational mobility.