Non-suffering Work: China's Medical Interventions in South Sudan

Abstract This paper explores China's mode of medical intervention in South Sudan and compares it with the medical humanitarianism and global health imaginaries and modes of intervention that characterize the activities of the wider international community, especially NGOs and faith-based organizations. In their provision of medical aid to South Sudan, organizations of the international community largely draw on a discourse of suffering and a framework of emergency response to humanitarian crises in post-conflict settings, which often translates into vertical programmes which involve direct governance of the South Sudanese population. In contrast, China's contemporary medical interventions in South Sudan are a mixture of health diplomacy, health infrastructure and development aid, an assemblage which can be understood as a “non-suffering” model of care and a loosely defined apparatus of biopolitics. However, the obvious gap between national goals and the daily experiences of individual Chinese doctors suggests that this will be an uneven process of “becoming.”