earticle

한국어

Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Villageis a literary work that examines how life, power, and capital intersect and institutionalize exploitation through the historical backdrop of blood-selling and epidemic outbreaks in rural China during the 1990s. This study analyzes the novel through Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopoliticsand governmentality, aiming to critically explore the dynamics between power and subjectivity rather than offering a mere social indictment. The protagonist Ding Hui imitates state governance and constructs a blood economy driven by capitalist greed, which transforms bodies into commodities and death into profit—an embodiment of biocapitalism. The government seal (官印), though formally a symbol of state authority, operates as a symbolic mechanismthat legitimizes systemic violence. This reflects Foucault’s insight that power functions through the internalization of symbols, knowledge, and institutional norms, not merely through coercion. Within this system, villagers become disciplined subjectswho obey to survive, gradually internalizing the logic of power and contributing to the disintegration of the community. Greed, as a contagious force, spreads more destructively than the physical epidemic itself. In contrast, Ding Liang emerges as the novel’s ethical subject, resisting the power-capital nexus through acts of care and atonement. However, his resistance is ultimately isolated and tragic, revealing how ethics and human dignity are rendered powerless under biopolitical regimes. The novel’s publication in 2006—during the Chinese government’s concealment of the AIDS crisis—underscores its political urgency. Yet its significance extends beyond that moment, offering prescient insight into how epidemics operate as political technologiesin contemporary times. As seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, measures such as lockdowns, surveillance, and quarantine are implemented under the pretense of protecting life, while silently enacting judgments about whose lives are protected and whose are neglected. This directly echoes Foucault’s assertion that biopolitical power is also a power of exclusion. Ultimately, Dream of Ding Villagedissects how epidemic governance restructures life, capital, ethics, and power. It invites reflection on the possibility of ethical subjectivity and humanity amid systems that instrumentalize life, portraying not only the collapse of community but also the precarious pursuit of moral resistance in the age of biopolitics.