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ABSTRACT
While most scholars agree that China’s central authorities are no longer the sole actors controlling socio-political life in the country, few have paid adequate attention to the proactive role of China’s grassroots actors, especially during critical public crises. During the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, Chinese society was fragmented in its response. Rural authorities imposed capricious and uneven restrictions, and civil disobedience among urban residents assumed myriad guises. The degree to which state directives on virus control were implemented within rural China depended on two factors: individual villages’ social structures, and how effectively political pressures were channeled from the top down. Furthermore, quarantined residents in urban areas should not be understood as passive victims, but rather as active subjects, whose diverse manifestations of civil disobedience during the crisis posed a challenge to the effectiveness of official restriction policies.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the CAS editorial board for their support and patience throughout the peer review process and to the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and suggestions that enlarged our theoretical horizon.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Yao Song is a visiting scholar in the Global Studies Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen). His research interests are China's foreign policy, paradiplomacy and the Greater Mekong Subregion.
Tianyang Liu is an associate professor in the School of Politics and Public Administration at Wuhan University. His work has appeared in Political Geography, the Health Sociology Review, and the Pacific Review, among other journals.
Xiangyang Wang is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs and Law at Southwest Jiaotong University. His current research focuses on rural politics and governance in China.
Tianru Guan is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Wuhan University. Her research has been published in the Journal of Contemporary China, Media, Culture and Society, and the International Political Science Review, among other journals.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Greitens and Gewirtz Citation2020.
2 Horton Citation2020; Chen et al. Citation2020.
3 Greitens and Gewirtz Citation2020. There are a few notable exceptions. Wang Chen and his colleagues have argued that Wuhan’s municipal government took the initiative to suspend public transportation in mid-January, before the WHO had recommended international travel restrictions (see Wang et al. Citation2020). This turned out to be erroneous, since the lockdown of Wuhan was directly ordered by President Xi Jinping.
4 Ren Citation2020.
5 Chen Citation2020.
6 Lu Citation2001.
7 Nathan and Tsai Citation1995.
8 Keller Citation2016.
9 Lewis Citation1963; Perkins Citation1966.
10 Meisner Citation1986.
11 Vogel Citation2011.
12 Lam Citation2015.
13 See Brown Citation2018; Kautz Citation2020.
14 Zheng Citation2007; Hameiri and Jones Citation2016.
15 For example, see Liu and Song Citation2019, Citation2020.
16 Breslin Citation2013.
17 Lieberthal and Oksenberg Citation1988.
18 Zheng Citation2007; He Citation2007.
19 See Hu and Shaoguang Citation2001.
20 Yang Citation2013.
21 Liu Citation2014.
22 Kanbur and Xiaobo Citation1999.
23 See Zhang and Kevin Citation2003; Wan, Ming, and Zhao Citation2007.
24 Wolfe Citation2020, 3; Katz Citation1996.
25 “Grid governance” (wanggehua zhili) has in recent years been widely implemented as a grassroots governance tool in urban China. The structure of grid governance brings municipal administration, public security, and social service management into one wide-ranging governance network that includes district-level government (qu), street offices (jiedao) and residential communities (shequ). Street offices and residential communities are divided into grids (wangge) according to their geographical and administrative boundaries, with each grid being assigned government personnel – “grid-workers” – to provide social services to each zone of administration and to report local activities to government. For more information, see Tang Citation2020.
26 Personal interview, March 2020.
27 An old saying in rural areas in central China, indicating that migrants could not care less about what happens in their home villages.
28 People’s Daily Citation2020.
29 Ft.com Citation2020.
30 Hinchliffe et al. Citation2013.
31 Rozelle Citation2020
32 Zhang Citation2020.
33 Fluri Citation2019.
34 Fangfang Riji, recently published in English under the title, Wuhan Diary.
35 The China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, which was founded in 1949, is nominally a non-government organization controlled by the Chinese Communist Party through its United Front office.
36 Gao and Yu Citation2020, 7.
37 Gao and Yu Citation2020, 9.
38 Fang Fang Citation2020, March 2.
39 Fang Fang Citation2020, February 2, March 7.
40 See footnote 26 for more information on grid workers and grid governance (wanggehua zhili).
41 Wuhan converted eleven venues, including gymnasiums, exhibition centers, and sports centers, into temporary shelter hospitals, called fangcang hospitals, to receive and patients with mild Covid-19 symptoms.
42 Huang and Smith Citation2010; Wang, Sainan, and Yungong Citation2020.