Neighbourhood governance, citizen initiatives and media application: Investigating community group buying during Shanghai's COVID lockdown

ABSTRACT

Academic debates highlight bureaucratic steering of crisis governance in authoritarian China. Nonetheless, the crisis response from the bottom up has been less represented. To address this lacuna, we explore how citizens initiate the crisis response in the neighbourhood by investigating Community Group Buying (CGB) during the 2022 pandemic lockdown in Shanghai. We qualitatively analyze the narratives of Chinese stakeholders, to get insight into the dynamics, components and implications of CGB. This study indicates that facing urgent needs and the failure of institutional response system, community residents leveraged social media to bond together to purchase essentials in bulk during the lockdown. The components of CGB involve constructing online interactive spaces, creating community conventions, forming leadership, optimizing CGB procedures, legitimizing CGB by social media promotion. CGB favoured neighbourhood ties and advanced civic participation and increased the reciprocal interaction of the state and society and the responsiveness of policy practitioners to public demands during crises. However, local disagreements eroded volunteerism and citizens' initiatives in neighbourhood governance to some extent. Our study will not only deepen global audiences' understanding of spontaneous neighbourhood governance in authoritarian China, but also contribute neighbourhood-level solutions for responding to the future crises globally.