State and Society in Extreme Times: China’s Early Response to COVID-19 Outbreak

This special issue of The China Review is the first instalment of a two-part article collection on how the state and society in China responded to the onset of the “new coronavirus (新冠 xinguan)” crisis— later officially referred as the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic—within the country in the first half of 2020. The initial plan back in March 2020 was to publish one special issue on the issue by early 2021. However, the global call for papers in mid-April received 37 abstracts within a month; “above our expectations” would be an understatement. Due to the high volume of and diverse submissions, the workload was doubled, with two consecutive parts constituting this special issue. The first group of selected articles published in this volume of The China Review focus on domestic challenges and power dynamics, and the second on China’s foreign relations in the context of the rapidly worsening pandemic across the world.¹

Reflecting on the six articles that focus on the Chinese state and society’s domestic activities at the beginning of the crisis, three points are worth noting. First, several concepts and frameworks essential to the China field, such as authoritarian resilience, central-local relations, social and medial control, and civil society, are featured in the articles included in this issue. Ran Ran and Yan Jian’s opening article, “When Transparency Meets Accountability,” dives into probably the most intriguing aspect of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—what happened in Wuhan in January 2020 and how central-local political dynamics got in the way of managing a public health crisis. In “Who Are the Front-Runners?,” Kai Zhou and Ge Xin continue the inquiry related to the internal discord of the Chinese state during the early stage of epidemic management and examine the noticeable discrepancies in provincial-level policies. To examine the Chinese state in crisis management but from a different angle, a team of academics based at Zhejiang University conducted an online survey on residents’ attitudes toward central and local governments regarding the lockdown measures. Using the survey data, Zhenhua Su, Shan Su, and Qian Zhou, in “Government Trust in a Time of Crisis” (to be published in the next issue), find that many local governments enjoyed a higher level of trust than the usual time during the early stage of the pandemic, resulting in the convergence of trust between central and local governments.

Yao Wen’s article, “Branding and Legitimation: China’s Party Diplomacy amid the COVID-19 Pandemic,” focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) International Department, interacting proactively with foreign political parties and agencies soon after the Wuhan lockdown. It may seem to be stand-alone in this volume. However, its main observations and interpretations echo some of those made in the above-mentioned articles and a large body of literature in the China field that underlines the adaptive capacity, sustained popularity, and resilience of the authoritarian state.²

Second, the special issue was intended to go deeper than media analysis and produce an “academic snapshot” of the unprecedented events in China and beyond during 2020. Whether this goal has been reached remains to be seen. In a way, the articles included here may have offered more tempting questions than definite conclusions. In “Information Authoritarianism vs. Information Anarchy,” Chunyan Ding and Fen Lin compare both official and social media coverage on COVID-19 in the Mainland and Hong Kong during the early stage of the pandemic. Their research, on the one hand, helps to clarify how Chinese authorities controlled the media and information dissemination and how Chinese society defied such control and, on the other, opens the discussion of a puzzling situation that two drastically different “media ecosystems” in the Mainland and Hong Kong, founded on different sociopolitical systems, both failed the public to be better prepared for the pandemic. Likewise, the article “Civil Society Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic” also shows that despite macro-level sociopolitical differences, civil society organizations acted similarly in China, Japan, and South Korea, complying with, instead of...