The Politics Of Disaster Management In China

In China’s 4,000-year-long history and modern development, natural disaster management has been about not only human combat against devastating natural forces, but also institutional building, political struggle, and economic interest redistribution among different institutional players. A significant payoff for social scientists studying disasters is that they can reveal much of the hidden nature of political and economic processes and structures, particularly those in non-democracies, which are normally covered up with great care. This book reviews the problems and progress in the politics of China’s disaster management. It analyses the factors in China’s governance and political process that restrains its capacity to manage disasters. The book helps the audience better understand the dynamic relationship among various interest groups and civic forces in modern China’s disaster politics, with special emphasis on the process of pluralization, decentralization and fragmentation.

This book shows how Chinese officials have responded to popular and international pressure, while at the same time seeking to preserve their own careers, in the context of disaster management. Using the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake as a case study, it illustrates how authoritarian regimes are creating new governance mechanisms in response to the changing global environment and what challenges they are confronted with in the process. The book examines both the immediate and long-term effects of a major disaster on China’s policy, institutions, and governing practices, and seeks to explain which factors lead to hasty and poorly conceived reconstruction efforts, which in turn reproduce the very same conditions of vulnerability or expose communities to new risks. In short, it tells a “political” story of how intra-governmental interactions, state-society relations, and international engagement can shape the processes and outcomes of recovery and reconstruction.

In this timely book about the current state of research and practice of emergency management in China, the authors take as their basic premises that we now live in a risk society and that our collective ability to deal with disasters and their aftermath is more important than ever. Set within a multi-disciplinary framework that places risk, disaster and crisis, the three phases of emergency management, on an analytical continuum, and drawing on empirical data obtained through surveys, observations, and interviews, the study not only provides a thorough overview of recent progress in our theoretical understanding of the subject but also offers insights on how scientifically informed policies can improve the way emergency management is done in China.

This book uses cutting-edge methods, such as big data mining methods on social media, generalized difference in difference, inoperational input–output models, improved data envelopment analysis, improved computable general equilibrium and others to calculate the economic impacts of climate and environmental disasters on China. This book provides the ideas, methods and cases of the redistribution of air pollution emissions in China through evaluating the benefits of meteorological disaster services and meteorological financial insurance. Using big data resources and data mining methods, as well as econometric models, etc., this book provides a comprehensive assessment of the economic impact of disasters in China and studies China's counterpart aid policy and international aid policy for disasters. This book is an academic monograph devoted to the China’s case study. The intended readership includes academics, government officials, graduate students and people concerned about China.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of crisis management in China. It considers economic, political and military crises, and also natural disasters and public health problems. In each area it considers the nature of potential crises and their possible effects, and the degree to which China is prepared to cope with crises.

In this indispensable and comprehensive text, Scott D. Watson critically examines the current understanding of international order that underpins international disaster management and disaster diplomacy. Based on empirical analysis of the three international disaster management regimes - disaster relief, disaster risk reduction, and disaster migration - and case studies of disaster diplomacy in the United States, Egypt and China, Watson argues that international disaster management and disaster diplomacy are not simply efforts to reduce the impact of disasters or to manage bilateral relations but to reinforce key beliefs about the larger international order. Challenging the conventional understandings of disasters as natural, as exogenous shocks, or as unintended and accidental outcomes of the current order, this text shows how the ideological foundations of the current heterogenous international order produce recurrent disasters. International Order and the Politics of Disaster is a vital source for undergraduate or graduate students interested in international responses to disasters and complex humanitarian emergencies, forced migration and displacement, as well as climate change and development.

China suffers frequently from many types of natural disasters, which have affected the lives of many millions of Chinese. The steps which the Chinese state has taken to prevent disasters, mitigate their consequences, and reconstruct in the aftermath of disasters are therefore key issues. This book examines the single metropolis of Tianjin in northern China, a city which has suffered particularly badly from natural disasters – the great famine of 1958-61, the great flood of 1963 and the great earthquake of 1976. It discusses how the city managed these disasters, what policies and measures were taken to prevent and mitigate disasters, and to promote reconstruction afterwards. It also explores who suffered from and who benefited from the disasters. Overall, the book shows how disaster management was erratic, sometimes managed highly efficiently and in other cases disappointingly delayed and inept. It concludes that, although the Maoist state possessed formidable resources, disaster management was always constrained by other political and economic considerations, and was never an automatic priority.

This book explores how China's political system responds to crisis. A crisis is an episode whose impact cannot be controlled merely by astute on-the-ground incident management, particularly in cases involving widespread doubt about the legitimacy of established policy paradigms or the political order as a whole. Crisis can create “political windows” for advocacy groups challenging established policies in pluralist democracies. The political battle between competing definitions of an uncertain and ambiguous situation among the various actors provides them with crisis-induced opportunity space for dramatic policy change. However, the process of crisis-induced policy change, mainly by crisis framing, in non-west regimes like China has not been adequately addressed. As China's leadership foregrounds legitimacy in “victory” over COVID-19, and a new era of climate change disasters begins, this dynamic model of crisis and recuperation will offer food for thought for scholars of Chinese and global politics.

China is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and also suffers from devastating climate catastrophes. Increasingly, policymakers in China have come to realize that government alone cannot adequately prevent or defray climate-related disaster risks. This book contends that a better way to manage catastrophe risk in China is through private insurance rather than directly through the Chinese government. In addition, private insurance could function as a substitute for, or complement to, government regulation of catastrophe risks by causing policyholders to take greater precautions to reduce climate change risks.

This book looks at the then-nascent emergency management sector in China, specifically the 2003–2012 period, that arose from the 2003 SARS crisis and subsequently set the stage for its responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Covering not only the amended and new laws and regulations at the national level, the book also includes the rearrangement and creation of the organizational structures, as well as the response plans for individual emergencies that were either recrafted or created during this period. Beyond chronicling the milestones and products of this transformation, this book highlights the key ideas and ideals that guided the various stakeholders, from the governing elites to the policy experts during this process. The book demonstrates how definitions of emergency management and emergency categories, as well as other ideational objects, were initially either absent or weakly developed, but were refined to the extent that they helped corral disparate actors into China’s new organizational field of emergency management.