Seeking opportunities from crisis? China’s governance responses to the COVID-19 pandemic
| Author | Yijia Jing |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320985146 |
Seeking opportunities
from crisis? China’s
governance responses to
the COVID-19 pandemic
Yijia Jing
Fudan University, China
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a challenge to state capacities on all countries
of the world and a genuine test of their abilities of opportunity management. In com-
parison, China has managed to promptly get the pandemic under effective control and
firmly enhanced domestic support for the government. This article argues that China’s
successful opportunity management was firmly shaped by its institutional settings, gov-
erning structures, and actor strategies. While the noncompetitive regime, unitary gov-
ernment, performance legitimacy, and high citizen trust afforded strong political
commitment, China’scrisismanagementexperiencesand capacitiesfacilitated quick
and effective coordination. Further, top leaders made use of the crisis to demonstrate
accountable leadership and push forward a grand reform agenda. The nature and func-
tioning of these pro-success factors are inherently rooted in the unique Chinese
context.
Points for practitioners
This study shows a successful story ofopportunity management in crises in the Chinese
context under the COVID-19 pandemic scenario. Political leaders and public managers
should enable systematic and prompt governance responses to such major challenges by
building up a broad political consensus and coordinating evidence-based emergency
responses. The study shows that clear accountability in crises is a major factor determin-
ing the capability of a system to take decisive actions and should be seriously recon-
structed by countries struck by the pandemic.
Corresponding author:
Yijia Jing, Fudan University, 811 Wenke Building, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, China.
Email: jingyj@fudan.edu.cn
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2021, Vol. 87(3) 631–650
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852320985146
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
Keywords
COVID-19, crisis management, governance responses, opportunity management, state
capacities
Introduction
As the most severe post-Second World War global public health crisis, the
COVID-19 global pandemic has created an unexpected and serious test of the
state capacities of countries with varying political regimes and levels of socio-
economic development (Fukuyama, 2020). Governance responses to the pandemic,
as well as the results, have been drastically different (Bouckaert et al., 2020;
Capano et al., 2020; Hall et al., 2020). While some countries like China (He
et al., 2020) quickly and decisively adopted coping strategies against the pandemic,
and grasped the chance for opportunity management, some were lost in internal pol-
itical battles, blame avoidance and inaction. Comparative studies of governance
responses to the pandemic may not only reflect how resilient and robust a system
is in front of this sudden and extreme challenge, but also disclose why the pandemic
and the system have interacted in a certain way, resulting in such responses and
results. In comparison, East Asian countries demonstrated tough state interventions
and strict citizen compliance and self-discipline, and were among the earliest to get
the pandemic under control.
1
This article adopts the definition of opportunity management as “the ‘usage’of
the crisis as a window of opportunity”(Kuhlmann et al., forthcoming) and analyzes
why Chinese political actors could make use of this crisis to strengthen ongoing
reform paths and state legitimacy by taking effective governance responses. Since
the COVID-19 outbreak, China took two months to curb the massive domestic
spread of the pandemic (December 27, 2019–February 20, 2020), another month
to reduce daily confirmed cases below 10 (by March 17), and then another month
to fully clear hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Wuhan City in Hubei Province
(by April 28) (State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of
China, 2020). By November 1, 2020, China’s cumulative confirmed cases were
91,373, ranking 17th among the G20 member countries and representing 0.28%
of the G20 total. It is the world’s only country whose economic growth became
positive in the second quarter of the year.
2
Various international surveys show
that citizen trust of government rose to a new high.
3
As the Chinese war against
COVID-19 happened during a period when China aimed to establish its modern
state governance systems and capacities (Jing, 2020), this case provides a vantage
point from which to observe the advantages and disadvantages of the Chinese
regime.
Since China was initially anticipated as the biggest loser and derided by some as
“the Real sick man of Asia”(Mead, 2020), why could China succeed in achieving
632 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(3)
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