Governing Life and Beyond: The Politics of Survival in Mo Yan’s Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh

Abstract

This paper examines selected short stories from Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh written by Mo Yan and critically explores governance, survival, death, and the instability of human subjectivity set in post-socialist China. Mo Yan’s fiction highlights a system in which power operates through life, as well as the instrumentalization of death. Using theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the paper demonstrates how governance extends from the management of populations to the production of the living dead subjects whose bodies remain economically and politically valuable beyond death. A close textual analysis of four selected short stories is conducted to explore how biopolitical regimes initially produce surplus life, which gets abandoned later, and subsequently, the necropolitical structures transform death into an opportunity for extraction. Mo Yan also destabilizes the boundaries between human and nonhuman as a result of biopolitics, foregrounding human subjectivity as mutable under conditions of extreme deprivation and war-time trauma. The short stories critique modern governance as a system that exploits life, abandons life, cures life, and alters life, making the human body an unstable and negotiable category under the heavy surveillance.

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest related to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article, and that the data presented have not been fabricated or falsified.

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant or financial support from public, commercial, or not-for profit funding agencies.

Participant Consent:  The authors confirm that Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and confidentiality was duly maintained.

Data Fabrication/Falsification Statement: The authors declare that no data have been fabricated, falsified, or manipulated in this study.

Copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 Tahreem Soomro & Yun Gong