Authoritarian Crisis Response to COVID-19 in China

What explains the Chinese government's differentiated response to the COVID-19 pandemic? This chapter argues that the same sources of control in authoritarian crisis response that enable the state to mobilize resources and people hamper the flexibility and nimbleness needed to adapt amid uncertainty. It analyzes how political priorities in a predominantly top-down system and experience with past infectious disease outbreaks shape the public health approach to COVID-19 and examines the response from late 2019 through mid-2022 in three approximate phases: early missteps and institutional impediments, rapid shift in response effectiveness, and top-down control and cracks in zero-COVID. Initial reactions were dispersed and incremental as local officials wrestled with how loudly to sound the alarms on the emergence of a new respiratory virus that seemed to be spreading. Beijing eventually backed a centralized, coordinated effort. The ramped-up response was effective, if authoritarian and heavy-handed at times. Since then, the scale and speed of the state's ability to assemble testing, tracing, quarantining, and isolating capacity and other measures enabled China to generally enclose inevitable flare-ups in most of 2020 and 2021. But unyielding pursuit of dynamic zero-COVID policy through mid-2022 reveals a fragile flip side of dogged top-down control. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Campaign-Style Paired Assistance: The Chinese Experience in Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic

To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government initiated a medical resource allocation and assistance mechanism that was characterized as a large-scale and regional mutual approach. Specifically, thirty provinces delivered medical resources (e.g., medical staff, medical supplies, and living materials) to "1+16” cities severely affected by the epidemic within a small amount of time, which solved the dilemma of medical collapse and governance "downtime” in epidemic areas, thereby changing the prevalence curve of the pandemic in China. "Campaign-style” targeted assistance can be interpreted based on the Chinese dual party-government model as well as the governance model of vertical accountability and horizontal competition, drawing from previous experience of normalized "designated assistance.” Consequently, paired assistance contributes to intergovernmental situations of decreasing divisibility and increasing cooperation. This study has the potential to bring insights to other countries around the world that are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Decentralized governance and collective action dilemma: Sub-national governments' responses to COVID-19 in China

While the Chinese government's responses to COVID-19 since its outbreak have been widely discussed, scant attention has been paid to the cross-regional variation in China in handling the pandemic in the early stage. This article adopts and synthesizes the theory of regionally decentralized governance and the institutional collective action dilemma framework to offer a novel analytical characterization of the pattern of sub-national governments' counter-COVID-19 initiatives in different policy areas and highlights the peer effect and regional competition dynamics. We provide three brief case studies to illustrate various institutional collective action dilemmas under this framework that emerged in pandemic responses and must be addressed through re-centralization. Despite its focus on China's regional responses to COVID-19, this paper prompts the construction of a broad analytical framework for precipitating a better understanding of the complex structure of China's political and governance system in a time of crisis.

Local variation and central-local relations in China's pandemic management

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the importance of state capacity and organizational structure in responding to public health emergencies. The variegated outcome of response mechanisms across the world requires a comparative approach to policy response and learning as well as public governance. The Chinese case has so far been discussed in the literature with regard to its initial delay in launching pandemic management process, and later effectiveness in providing healthcare solutions at the epicenter of the pandemic. This research offers a three-dimensional approach to pandemic management: patient treatment, case containment, and welfare provision to compensate for public health measures. The variable policy processes of local governments outside the epicenter aimed at slowing down the spread of COVID-19 and alleviating the burden of lockdown. The research question is whether these policies were central government-led or cases of local variation? The dataset is composed of over 1000 documents published in the initial stages of the pandemic. The documents include local government policies for patient treatment, case containment and welfare provision from 10 provinces and 10 provincial-level cities across China, excluding the autonomous regions. Analysis of the data indicates that localities selectively implemented central directives and those localities that are critical in terms of geography, demography or economics took initiative for policy innovation. Inter-locality rivalry also played a role in the policy process. This research contributes to the literature on central-local relations in China, and public policy and governance in the post-pandemic era. China, Covid-19, local governance, local variation, emergency governance.

Novel virus, novel response: Local discretion and responses to COVID-19 in Hebei Province, China.

The Chinese Communist Party is consolidating one party rule under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Beijing seeks to rule by central mandate while limiting local autonomy. The central government response to the COVID-19 public health emergency reinforces this view. In January 2020 Beijing established the Central Epidemic Response Leading Group to mobilise a comprehensive nationwide policy effort to contain the virus. The exceptional nature of the COVID-19 national emergency allows the central government to project power over local authorities and leverage over citizens, but we argue that this is a short-term phenomenon because local disease control initiatives remain important, with local authorities adapting national policies to meet constituent needs. There are degrees of policy discretion and divergence at the subnational level that enable context-specific responses to the virus within China's strict bureaucratic hierarchy. Primary data derives from interviews and observations in Nancun village, Hebei Province, conducted from January to April 2020. Evidence from Nancun explains how local authorities interpret the edicts and mandates of the central government.