Guan'ai in the People's War on Drugs: Understanding Care in China's State-Run Addiction Treatment Programs

Abstract

China's drug control arena is undergoing a dramatic governance shift from the (quasi)criminalization of drug use to the medicalization of addiction as a chronic brain disease. This paper examines how the establishment of a state-run methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) program has shaped the ethics and logic of care in (post)socialist China. Morally fraught questions about how drug users should be cared for and by whom ultimately reveal key insights about what “care” means in the drug control field and in contemporary Chinese society more generally. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at MMT clinics in Yunnan province from 2013 to 2016, this paper investigates the ideology and everyday practices of guān'ài (literally care and love), a politicized sentiment of care deployed in government propaganda as a key component of the 'People's War on Drugs.' Rather than simply providing a biological substitute in the form of methadone, China's MMT program was also designed as an affective replacement therapy to rehabilitate the social status of stigmatized drug users as legitimate targets of state care. These discourses and practices have become an important political and moral resource that many methadone users have adopted to claim moral legitimacy and reconstitute their relationships with the Chinese state and the broader society.