Covid-19 has plunged the world in deep crisis and the end of the current global disorder is unforeseeable. 'Life' is the most common utterance when people talk about the pandemic, whereas any explanation of its global-political effects by referring to deaths will be misleading if no proper conception of 'life' is postulated. Drawing upon the concept of biopolitics of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, this article will argue that Covid-19 has been framed by most state-governments as a pressing security issue that demands exceptional official measures. In mapping the genealogy of the concept of security itself, I will show that the current global imagination of Covid-19 has already deviated from the original concern about life. It is fundamentally a geo-cultural competition between China and the West as a cumulation of institutional fetishism and identity politics after the Cold War.