Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography, Vol. 15 · No 1· May 2025 © 2025 Urbanities https://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/vol-15-no-1-may-2025/ 72 Xiaoqu in Motion: Gated Housing Compounds and the Infrastructure of China’s Urban Biopolitics 1 Mengqi Wang Duke Kunshan University, China Mw397@duke.edu The predominant form of urban housing in China comprises apartment buildings nestled in residential gated communities called xiaoqu. Small and large xiaoqu with communal gardens, playgrounds and iron gates manned by property management companies dot China’s urban landscape. Arguing against the existing research that analyses gating along lines of class differentiation and reproduction, this paper highlights the infrastructural power xiaoqu exerts in the field of spatial governance in urban China. Using an autoethnographic lens, I collected data in the lower Yangtze River region from fall 2021 to the spring of 2022, when the city of Suzhou implemented strict lockdown measures, including surveillance, mass testing, home quarantines and reporting and transporting of infected residents to centralised quarantine facilities. During this period, gated compounds became the physical and social spaces from which emerged thick practices and politics of on-the-ground mobilisation and organisation, mutual care and policing that coalesced within the xiaoqu into a form of urban biopolitics that, in turn, constrained and shaped under duress the agency of residents. I highlight the act of sealing in the use of infrastructural and digitalised surveillance technologies through which the state disciplined the bodily movements of xiaoqu residents for pandemic prevention. In conclusion, I argue that xiaoqu serves as a socio-spatial force facilitating the operation of pandemic biopolitics and undermines it from below. Keywords: Urban governance, pandemic, zero-COVID, surveillance, sealing. Introduction Testing Site No. 4 is an anchor point for my memory of the pandemic. From 2020 to 2022, I lived in Sunshine Garden — a gated housing compound of approximately a few hundred residents in Suzhou, a city half an hour away from Shanghai by speedy rail. Of the six testing sites in our community, this was the closest to our apartment, located within Building No. 11. Throughout the fall and winter of 2021 and 2022, we would walk to this site once every 2–3 days for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) testing. On the testing day, medical staff in white hazmat suits would arrive at the housing compound and be stationed at these testing sites. The housing estate’s property management office (PMO), known as the wuye, was responsible for preparing and organising the testing. Once the medical staff were ready, personnel from the wuye, with a loudspeaker, would call out residents from specific buildings to come to the site for testing. This usually happened in the early morning. Those who had completed testing would receive a red paper slip, which would need to be presented to the guard at the compound’s manned gate on their way out. During weekdays, the lines were usually long, as people rushed 1 This article benefits first from the conversation I had with Nellie Chu, Ralph Litzinger and a few other colleagues throughout 2021 and 2022, when many of us were coping with zero-COVID strictures. In fall 2022, Minhua Ling and Juan Zhang invited me to contribute a short essay to a special issue on zero- COVID. The participation in this special issue prompted me to write down ethnographic accounts on lived experience under zero-COVID. The work produced was a short reflexive essay published under a pseudonym in 2023 on HAU: the Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The further documentation and theorization of these experience took another full year and produced this article. I would also like to thank the editors and reviewers of Urbanities, whose feedback helped with the revision of this article.