The role of the state in China’s post-disaster reconstruction planning: Implications for resilience

Abstract

Chinese

Rooted in natural and engineering sciences, the concept of resilience has attracted growing attention in social science and public policy. The evolving resilience paradigm assumes the concept is at odds with state control, and instead emphasises the coping capacities of communities and individuals. This assumption might overlook the multifaceted and context-specific nature of resilience. Drawing on an empirical study of state-led reconstruction planning, this article argues that it is the deep and active involvement of the state, rather than its retreat, that helps promote resilience building in China’s earthquake-hit areas. Through a combination of online questionnaire survey and interviews, the article assesses how the Chinese state mobilises and coordinates a wide range of state and non-state actors to enable communities to achieve different aspects of resilience, while also sometimes constraining them from doing so.

Keywords

built environment planning policy reconstruction planning resilience

Introduction

Critical engagements with resilience as a conceptual category often couch it within examinations of state–society relationships, in terms of the interactions and distribution of responsibilities between the state and society on resilience building for individuals and communities (Chandler, 2013; Tierney, 2015). In existing scholarship, notably the traditional liberal literature, resilience and state control are often portrayed as irreconcilable. One prevailing vision is that, far from signalling the need for more state intervention, a disaster should lead society to be ever more resilient by stimulating individuals’ coping and adaptive capacities. This sees resilience less as an ‘endpoint’ than as a process, in which people learn not for ‘preventing future catastrophe but [for] preventing the disruptive or destabilizing effects of such an event’ (Chandler, 2013: 210). This approach to resilience, which underscores the self-organising ability of systems, reverberates with the civic traditions underpinning the neoliberal political economy, in which the role of the state is diminished, and individuals and communities are challenged to be entrepreneurial to safeguard their lives (Tierney, 2015). Although many critiques have documented the negative consequences of this neoliberal approach to resilience (Adams, 2013; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013), these otherwise insightful works have done little to explore conceptually and practically alternative approaches to resilience building.

Building on the extant scholarship that critically engages with resilience in the state–society relationship, this article contemplates the view that resilience – the ‘responsive capacities’ of systems to shocks (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013: 253) – and strong state control may not always be contradictory. A more discerning view is required to understand resilience building as a historical-geographically contingent process. In this regard, we suggest that the Chinese state’s approach to resilience inculcates a particular type of state–society relationship, in which the deep involvement of the state is essential in a context of growing disaster vulnerability. The Chinese state is an enduring hierarchical regime. It does not simply play a nudging role, but serves as an active and unparalleled agent in reconstruction. Resilience depends on the active intervention and remaking of the state-led planning regime to promote society’s coping and adaptive capacities.

We develop this argument through our empirical study of how and why resilience in its different conceptual forms has found expression in China’s post-disaster reconstruction planning, the key instrument of the state regime to tackle disaster-related impacts and improve the resilience of devastated communities (Ge et al., 2010; Johnson and Olshansky, 2016). As elaborated later, the state orchestrated the formation and development of both the physical and social attributes of resilience, albeit not always producing desirable outcomes. Through a state-led reconstruction planning regime, the state ensured efficient mobilisation of various actors to achieve rapid physical recovery, and stimulated innovation in local modes of socio-economic development. However, the top-down planning requirements did not encourage spared infrastructure provisions, nor did they favour capital building for self-organisation in local communities and flexible planning responses to local contingencies. Planners were sometimes left to pick up the pieces to plan for greater local resilience as they engaged affected communities with the state regime on critical decisions of recovery and reconstruction.

Our research findings draw on a thorough documentary review and two strands of first-hand investigations. First, an online questionnaire survey was conducted in 2016 with 61 planners involved in reconstruction planning at the local level following the 2008 Great Sichuan Earthquake (GSE) (27 planners), the 2010 Yushu Earthquake (15 planners) and the 2013 Lushan Earthquake (19 planners), the three most representative seismic disasters in China in recent years. These planners represent about one-tenth of all the planners involved in the reconstruction planning for the sites affected by the foregoing earthquakes.¹ They were recruited by snowball sampling, starting from three leading planning institutes, namely, the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD), Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute (GZPI) and Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute. The three institutes were commissioned to carry out reconstruction planning for the sites under investigation. The participants completed a template we designed to gauge, against a series of attributes, the degree to which resilience thinking was incorporated into their planning practices (see the fifth section for details). Second, we undertook 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews between 2011 and 2017 with planners, local officers and affected residents associated with the three earthquake cases. Questions we raised include what obstructed the application of pro-resilience planning policies, what institutional factors created the obstacles and how the planning regime was refined to overcome these obstacles. These questions help clarify why, as discussed later, some resilience attributes are better realised than others in the reconstructed communities.

Following this introduction, the second section introduces the evolving resilience concepts and their associated attributes. One focus is on how the evolving conceptual substances of resilience find expression in planning practices as specific, observable attributes. The third section explicates the debates on resilience through scrutinising its linkage with the state–society relationship. We stress that although resilience has become popular for its conceptual affinities with neoliberalism, this does not mean that the state must be marginalised in resilience building. The fourth section situates and develops this argument in the Chinese context by outlining the country’s socio-political settings in which the post-earthquake reconstruction planning regime is embedded. The fifth section analyses the online survey and interviews to reveal how the state promotes resilience of the earthquake-stricken communities through reconstruction planning. The article concludes with a summary of the research findings and reflections on the multifaceted role of the state in resilience building.

Evolving conceptualisations of resilience and its association with planning practice

Planning is a multidisciplinary field, whose practitioners and researchers constantly draw on knowledge from across social, natural and engineering sciences to inform their work. Resilience represents one of the latest intellectual imports to the planning domain, where it finds expression in its three different incarnations.

The first and the earliest of these is engineering resilience. Advocated by Holling (1973) in his theorisation on ecosystem stability, it emphasises a system’s ability to bounce back to pre-existing equilibrium after a disturbance. Defined in mathematical terms, it can be measured by the degree of resistance to disruption and the speed of bouncing back. This form of resilience finds resonance with the managerial and technical planning tradition, which highlights spatial equilibrium and structural resistance to disturbance for survival and a quick return to the status quo (Davoudi, 2012; Ge et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2015).

The second incarnation is ecological resilience. Whereas engineering resilience points to a single, stable equilibrium, ecological resilience posits a system’s ability to adapt to changes and evolve into a new equilibrium (Davoudi, 2012; Walker et al., 2004). Such understanding encourages the ability to bounce forth to new structures (Shaw and Maythorne, 2013), and celebrates possibilities for life beyond mere survival. This is the preferred conceptualisation of resilience for planning studies focusing on how a better future can be made through deliberation and vision setting (Eraydin, 2013).

The third incarnation is evolutionary resilience. Recognising the possibility of multiple equilibria, ecological resilience represents a more ‘complex and open-ended’ alternative to its engineering counterpart (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013: 256). However, some theorists have criticised it for preserving an equilibristic assumption (Folke et al., 2010; Simmie and Martin, 2010). These critics argue that resilience is evolutionary, as a ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being’, to stress a system’s continual ability to change, adapt and transform. This view echoes recent planning inquiries which admit the uncertainty of nature and highlight the ubiquity of change, fluidity and the transformative potential of novelty (Davoudi, 2012; Healey, 1997).

Besides being planners’ normative goal, resilience has rapidly infiltrated into the planning domain because of increased public awareness of environmental vulnerability. For instance, the concerns of some Western local governments about the threats of climate change have prompted the development of planning initiatives under the rubric of resilience, such as plans for land use patterns accommodative of more frequent flooding brought on by rising sea levels (Fainstein, 2018). To operationalise the concept, planning theorists and practitioners have identified eight major resilience attributes from the three conceptualisations of resilience. As shown in Table 1, these attributes range from built environment-related ‘physical attributes’ (robustness, efficiency, diversity, redundancy and physical connectivity) which underpin engineering and ecological approaches to resilience, to ‘social attributes’ (social connectivity, capital building, flexibility and innovation) which stem from an evolutionary perspective of resilience. Together these attributes provide a multi faceted framework for us to assess the strengths and weaknesses of China’s local reconstruction planning in promoting community resilience.

Table 1.

The resilience attributes as they appear in post-disaster planning practice.

Attribute	Definition	Simple presentation	Evidence of attribute in planning practice	Importance in different resilience approaches^a
Attribute	Definition	Simple presentation	Evidence of attribute in planning practice	Engineering resilience(recovery)	Ecological resilience(adaptation)	Evolutionary resilience(transformation)
Robustness	Ability to withstand a given level of stress without suffering degradation or loss of function (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	Degree of strength	Adequate consideration of development pattern in high-hazard areas (Berke and Campanella, 2006); level of structural resistance, actions of territorial prevention and actions of protective buffering (Fleischhauer, 2008); open space and buildings that withstand disaster (Eraydin, 2013)	++	+	+
Efficiency	Ability of a system to respond to an event (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	Rapidity of effective responses	Exerting comparative advantages (Fleischhauer, 2008); ability of a system to respond to an event (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	++	+	+ (Exerting comparative advantages: ++)^b
Diversity	Has a number of functionally different components in order to protect the system against various threats (Godschalk, 2003)	Degree of functionally different components	Social diversity (Vale and Campanella, 2005); mixed land use and functional diversity (Allan and Bryant, 2011)	–	+	+
Redundancy	Has a number of functionally similar components so that the entire system does not fail when one component fails (Godschalk, 2003)	Degree of functionally similar components	Polycentric urban form (Allan and Bryant, 2011; Batty, 2001); spare capacity purposely created within systems to accommodate disruption, extreme pressure and surges in demand (Da Silva and Morera, 2014)	–	+	+
Connectivity	Degree to which the nodes of a network are directly linked to each other, including the physical dimension as well as the relationships between people and organisations (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	Degree of physical linkage; degree of social linkage	Reconstructing social relations (Vale and Campanella, 2005); dialogue between citizens, planners and external organisations (Berke and Campanella, 2006); linkage with wider regions (Eraydin, 2013)	–	Physical: + Social: –^c	+
Capital building	Quality and quantity of social interactions that are shaped by institutions, relationships and societal norms (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	Capacity to shape social cohesion and foster future development	Institutional infrastructure (Temkin and Rohe, 1998); diversity and setting for public engagement (Berke and Campanella, 2006); formal and informal processes of decision making (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	–	–	+
Flexibility	Ability of an organisation to change or react (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	Capacity to modify and adapt	Site-specific spatial policies (Vale and Campanella, 2005); embrace adaptability rather than attempting to control or reduce it; strategic intervention (Allan and Bryant, 2011); ability to cope with and respond to novel situations and change without losing options for the future (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013); factual organisational and institutional changes (Schmitt et al., 2013); flexible solutions depending upon spatial heterogeneity, function and temporal change (Eraydin, 2013)	–	–	++
Innovation	Capacity to learn and create a new and different socio-ecological system (Taşan-Kok et al., 2013)	Capacity to create new mechanisms	Vision, direction-setting framework and ‘big community picture’, which are related to responses and policies at multiple geographical scales (Berke and Campanella, 2006); emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change; plans that reduce vulnerability and risk in the face of the unknown and unexpected (Hudson, 2009); human ingenuity and intentionality (Davoudi et al., 2013)	–	–	++

Notes: ^a The symbols in this column signify the level of presence of each attribute in each different resilience approach. A minus sign means that this aspect is not considered; a plus sign means that it is considered; a double-plus sign means that it is deemed important. ^b In the evolutionary resilience approach, exerting comparative advantages of different regions and different entities is far more valued over the mere rapidity of responding to an event. ^c The ecological resilience approach emphasises physical connectivity instead of social connectivity, since it ignores the nature of human-based socio-ecological systems and the complexity of interaction among stakeholders.

Becoming resilient: Implications of the state–society relationship

The reason for the wide application of resilience in planning is said to lie in its ideological fit with neoliberalism (Chandler, 2013; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013; Tierney, 2015; Walker and Cooper, 2011). Underscoring the presence of disruptive forces and the need for adaptation, resilience has parallels with the neoliberal worldview of a crisis-ridden economy and the neoliberal emphasis on individuals and communities pursuing growth and competitiveness to weather this economic situation.

The argument for a resilience-style neoliberal governance approach runs as follows: the world ‘is defined by disruption’ (Rodin, 2014: 4), and this constitutes a source of social and economic distress. Since the root causes of disruption are not alterable, following resilience thinking, adaptation is the only way out. By being adaptive, one can reap ‘dividend’ from disruption, such as finding new economic opportunities in the post-disruption context (Rodin, 2014). Such thinking leaves public institutions and individuals no option but to react continually to accommodate themselves to a world full of uncertainties. Seen this way, resilience cannot be achieved by simply demanding an end to distress through government intervention. Neither can it be fully attained by passively resisting the dangers. Rather, resilience as an adaptive and learning process of communities and individuals is embedded in the operation of their local society, often manifesting in ‘social capital’ terms (Aldrich, 2010; Putnam, 1993). This relates to a range of historically cultivated socio-infrastructures such as networks, trust-based interactions and relations of reciprocity, all inclined to the social attributes of resilience.

Following these views, resilience seems to resonate well with the neoliberal mode of the state–society relationship, which prefers bottom-up risk-taking and free choice over hierarchical government control (Tierney, 2015; Walker and Cooper, 2011). If there is any role for the state under neoliberalism, it is steering market investment in buildings and critical infrastructures and nudging citizens to make better choices, thereby shifting part of the government’s responsibility for resilient management to communities, individuals and the market (Edwards, 2009). Several studies have lent support to this ideal of promoting resilience through state retreat. In Alaska, Lewis and Conaty (2012) contend that salmon harvest has recovered because fishers took over from the state to collaboratively manage salmon hatcheries – a sign that community self-organisation trumps the state in promoting the resilience of the fisheries sector. Examining the effects of Federal Public Assistance on post-Katrina recovery, Smith and Birkland (2012) note that the programme’s prescriptive emphasis on speedy reconstruction to pre-event condition does not meet local needs to build capacity to withstand future disasters. They therefore call for a move ‘from hierarchical, rule-bound systems of disaster recovery to networked, cooperative, nonhierarchical systems’ (Smith and Birkland, 2012: 164) to enhance local levels of disaster resilience.

Nonetheless, recent writings have doubted the logical necessity of a link between resilience and the neoliberal preference for a self-reliant society. Evans (2011) warns us that the use of resilience may only serve to naturalise crises and obscure the human causes behind them, thereby precluding debates about the neoliberal agenda. MacKinnon and Derickson (2013: 260) similarly argue that resilience is employed by political systems as a discourse to ‘reinforce and extend existing trends in urban regional development policy towards increased responses to market conditions, strategic management and the harnessing of endogenous assets’. Challenging specifically the neoliberal mantra of the minimal state, Swanstrom et al. (2009: 48) offer evidence in their American study of the essential role of the state in resilience. While localised social practice such as the horizontal collaboration between public, private and non-profit actors is important, its effects are limited without ‘vertical’ policy support from federal and state governments. Only these institutions have the critical resources (e.g. law enforcement, funding and land authorisation) to ramp up local efforts to the level needed for foreclosure prevention and neighbourhood recovery. The ecologically rooted concept of resilience, Swanstrom et al. (2009) contend, is profoundly conservative when applied to society. It privileges a harmonious social network capitalising on endogenous assets, while neglecting the role of the state and politics. Contrarily, the state indeed continues to play a crucial role in commanding, controlling, reconfiguring and transforming the process of resilience building through influencing both its physical and social attributes, even as this process is significantly localised.

This article finds this alternative perspective on the state’s importance to resilience building particularly relevant to China, where the state is known for being far more proactive than its neoliberal counterparts in intervening in socio-economic development. The domain of post-disaster response is not immune to this tendency. In a retrospective of the historical development of the Chinese disaster recovery regime, Xie (2015) traces the rise of a nationally-inscribed system, with the central state as the primary geographical scaffolding of risk management. Johnson and Olshansky (2016) raise comparative themes when discussing contemporary post-GSE reconstruction. While this strong presence of the state reflects a continuity of the Communist Party-led authoritarian polity (Sorace, 2017), the state itself was institutionally reorganised to deal with the growing complexity of recovery and reconstruction. Specifically, as demonstrated below, the state strategically utilises extraterritorial resources and non-state actors to simultaneously speed up reconstruction and achieve its accumulation strategies (Menefee and Nordtveit, 2012). The remainder of the article will explore whether the ‘heavy-handed’ Chinese state contributes or instead jeopardises the development of resilience for affected communities.

China’s state-led post-disaster reconstruction planning

China’s planning regime for reconstruction is both centralised and fragmented (Figure 1). It is led by a central administration comprising different ministries, such as the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development (MHURD). This central body builds on China’s strong state tradition and enduring hierarchical system of statehood to exert a powerful influence on guidance and regulation for recovery and reconstruction. This central policy regime enables, at least rhetorically, a highly connected and efficient environment for post-disaster reconstruction across levels and among institutions (Shao and Xu, 2017). Nevertheless, the central administration is also deeply fragmented. Recovery tasks (risk assessment, plan formulation and policy studies) are undertaken by various central state constituencies. While both centralised and fragmented, the system gives much flexibility to post-disaster planning, which can work like an institutional ensemble, having multiple capacities and liabilities with no pre-defined structure. This configuration may allow great flexibility between different state agencies, but subject post-disaster reconstruction planning to inter-sectoral conflicts.

Figure 1.

The state-led post-disaster recovery planning regime.

The planners whom we approached mostly work in planning institutes and governmental planning agencies under the MHURD (e.g. CAUPD and GZPI). Some of them are from the planning schools of universities (e.g. Tongji University) and were commissioned by local governments to prepare reconstruction plans. They have to work within the current planning framework set by the State Council and the MHURD. For instance, a master plan for reconstruction has to follow the template of the general master plan. This covers mandatory rules for allocating space for different socio-economic activities. It has to determine the function of a city, and the distribution of critical infrastructures and other spatial elements like industrial zones, transportation hubs, wilderness and conservation areas. Moreover, there are disaster-related rules for reconstruction master plans. These include mandates on flood control standards, earthquake evacuation, rescue routes and sites and geological disaster protection requirements. They make a classic checklist for the engineering resilience approach, focusing on physical resilience attributes. Local planners in Wenchuan, Yushu and Lushan mostly provided supportive services to the outside planners who were commissioned by governments to make reconstruction master plans.

Though devised through the state-mandated planning regime, the reconstruction planning demonstrates features not evident in normal planning practices. The first relates to the speed of the planning process. Johnson and Olshansky (2016) remark that the pace of preparing and implementing the reconstruction plans was remarkable by any measure. This was made possible by the hierarchical state system, under which the superiors would hold government officials at every level accountable for quickly and diligently following the reconstruction plans. Second, reconstruction planners were engaged with multiple agents, both state and non-state, and both territorial and extraterritorial. Their planning practice is embedded in a web of extremely diverse power relations. The third feature concerns a series of top-down mandated planning requirements for seismic zones, such as enforcing seismic building codes and applying geology-attuned regulations to the categories and scales of land uses.

Finally yet importantly, adding to the complexities of reconstruction is the ‘pair assistance’ program (PAP). The PAP was mandated by the central state, which requires a better-off province to support a significantly damaged county. The provincial partner has to allocate 1% of its annual fiscal revenue for three years to support recovery and reconstruction. Funding is pooled to housing, public services and critical infrastructures. The assistance from partners also covers non-monetary aid such as planning formulation, architecture design, expert consultation and infrastructure construction and supervision (Johnson and Olshansky, 2016). The PAP has contributed significantly to reconstruction, but has also brought influential extraterritorial interests into the planning process (Ge et al., 2010). These interests give preference to certain strategies over others. For instance, PAP partners may prefer to build non-essential infrastructure (e.g. a concert hall) or add cultural elements from their own provinces, which are irrelevant to the affected communities’ needs. Yet, compared with normal planning practice, reconstruction planning has been more open to citizen participation in mobilising a social base of support. This may prove decisive in resolving disagreements. Nevertheless, the proliferation of interests may also make it difficult for visionary plans to gain a foothold.

There are several acute conflicts in reconstruction planning, including its temporal and spatial aspects. The temporal conflict is the tension between speed of recovery and deliberation over long-term vision (Johnson and Olshansky, 2016). In the case of Wenchuan, the central government mandated a three-year reconstruction period, which was too short to realise a thoughtful scheme. The spatial aspect relates to the tension between urban growth and limited land resources (Peng et al., 2014). All of our foregoing earthquakes occurred in mountainous areas with exceedingly limited land, creating enormous problems for recovery and new development. Secondary disasters, including debris flows and landslides, greatly hindered reconstruction and forced some compromises for urban construction on otherwise potentially dangerous hillsides and waterways and in disaster-prone regions.

In short, China’s reconstruction planning is a state-led act, one that is extraordinarily dependent on institutional innovation (e.g. the PAP) to formulate and implement plans in the face of urgency, but also extraordinarily constrained by the hierarchical state regime (e.g. top-down planning requirements). This provides an essential backdrop for the following empirical study.

Resilience building through reconstruction planning: China’s experience

As previously mentioned, data presented in this article is collected through an online survey and a range of interviews on local-level reconstruction planning. We broke down the concept of resilience into eight attributes (Table 1) and translated them into a series of easily comprehensible seven-point Likert scale questions, designed to reflect the resilience attributes as they appeared in the post-disaster planning process. Scores of 7 and 1 indicate the highest and lowest levels of agreement with a question, respectively. Although the specific attributes were not made explicit in the questionnaire, we provided detailed descriptions and examples to the surveyed planners to ensure they fully comprehended our reasoning. Of the 61 respondents, 44 (72.1%) of them had worked on reconstruction planning for more than three months. Fifty-seven (93.44%) had been involved in composing one or more reconstruction master plans, sectoral plans, development plans and/or site plans, while the remainder were involved in related planning research and formulation of planning guidelines. With this sample, the Cronbach’s alpha of the survey questions is 0.986, indicating high reliability. In subsequent discussion, survey results are reported by each question’s average score and, as an indicator of the variation of individual responses, the percentage of positive responses (PPR), that is, responses with a score of 5, 6 and 7.

Developing the physical attributes of resilience

Unlike other natural disasters, earthquakes have ill-defined source zones, but can be frequent and can cause widespread damage. Robustness is thus among the most important physical attributes to reduce earthquake risk. In China, this is mainly achieved through a hierarchical system of binding laws and regulations which impose planning requirements for seismic safety (Shao and Xu, 2017). Unsurprisingly, planners reported an average score of 5.85 (PPR = 90.16%) when asked whether they deliberately considered upgrading local capacity to withstand disasters through planning measures.

There are two major planning solutions. The first is to evaluate the levels of damage to buildings and to apply appropriate building technologies. This is exemplified by the intensive use of new earthquake-resistant technologies (see Xiao, 2015, for a list of these) in Yingxiu Town of Wenchuan County. The second is to rebuild disrupted towns away from high-risk areas. The central government requires a careful evaluation of settlement siting according to geological assessment and spatial particularities. It defines three options for reconstruction – in situ reconstruction, relocation within the existing jurisdiction and cross-jurisdiction relocation. The first option is the most popular, while the third option is the most difficult partly due to the hurdles of inter-jurisdiction coordination. The relocation of Beichuan, a town heavily destroyed in the GSE, to a new county was only made possible due to tremendous state-led effort.²

Most planners in our survey were attentive to the need to avoid hazardous sites, but had to contend with the acute conflict between growth imperatives and land shortage. In many cases, they were forced to give up the quest for strong disaster resistance. This is illustrated by the reconstruction in and around Weizhou Town, Wenchuan County, which faced a severe scarcity of buildable land. As one informant regretfully remarked:

The initial geological assessment report determined three categories of land according to different levels of suitability. Reconstruction was only allowed on suitable land and relatively suitable land after applying mitigation measures, while construction on unsuitable land was strictly forbidden. However, some unsuitable land was intentionally reclassified as suitable for construction, a hard compromise made due to severe land shortage.³

An example is the new Qipangou cluster of Weizhou. New development there was devastated by a mudslide in 2013.⁴ Although most interviewees were aware of the need to uphold robustness, under the conditions of land shortage – not least the ‘difficulty to relocate’ imposed by institutional obstacles – planners were sometimes unable to make the correct planning decisions. Robustness is thus undermined by shortcuts taken by the state for quick recovery.

Efficiency is another attribute frequently mentioned by planners. They viewed efficiency as being rapid plan-making and approval, a responsive work ethic and simplified organisational procedures. They valued this attribute highly, reporting an average score of 5.56 (PPR = 91.80%). This is mainly because the central government has made reconstruction its overwhelming priority (Johnson and Olshansky, 2016). In the words of one respondent:

the pressure from the government is overwhelming […] we worked two shifts, day and night, 24 hours a day; there were no weekends. It was extremely tiring for me and my colleagues, but a sense of responsibility and self-fulfilment carried us forward.⁵

Other physical attributes of resilience received less attention. Most planners did not cite diversity (i.e. the functional diversity of land use) as an essential concern. Nonetheless, diversity has been built into open space structures in some places. Local parks are often designed as disaster avoidance zones, in addition to having a variety of daily-life functions. Yingxiu’s reconstruction represents a more holistic approach to developing functional diversity. The town’s plan featured mixed land-use patterns and small urban blocks (Xiao, 2015). While being conducive to lively streetscapes, this also ensures that there are multiple routes for evacuation should a disaster occur.

Redundancy is also a rarely cited and practised attribute. The exceptional case is Yingxiu again. Its reconstruction plan explicitly used the term ‘redundancy’ for creating spare capacity to react to disruption. In an interview, we were told that:

Redundancy is a valued aspect in Yingxiu. For instance, at least two evacuation passageways were installed in designing the internal road system, so that if one end is blocked people can still evacuate safely via the other end. At each evacuation meeting point, backup sources of water and energy supplies were arranged.⁶

Generally speaking, redundancy is not adequately considered in most cases. Yet, we postulate that planners have marginally incorporated this attribute into their work ethic, since we can identify the application of redundancy through the creation of modular and clustered development in places such as Weizhou, Yingxiu and Beichuan (GZPI, 2008; Xiao, 2015). Indeed, one planner regretfully acknowledged the lack of consideration of redundancy and suggested more attention be paid to extra capacity for infrastructure in the future. Likewise, physical connectivity is not intentionally valued in reconstruction. Although some planners recognised the importance of integrating transport systems, they did not purposely promote this to build a more resilient community.

In short, robustness and efficiency are the two most cited and practised physical attributes of resilience among the respondents, while diversity, redundancy and physical connectivity receive inadequate attention from them. We contend that this inadequacy is rooted in the Chinese state. As Shao and Xu (2017) point out, China’s reconstruction planning policies place an overarching focus on robustness and efficiency to the neglect of the other three aspects. Planners may be bounded by the extant planning framework to consider only certain aspects of resilience in their practice. For example, Yingxiu’s planners find existing land use standards for small towns too low to reach the planning target of land use requirements of local residents who need extra space for their farm tools and small restaurants.⁷ This may undermine the ability of planning to promote the resilience attribute of diversity. In this regard, the development of the physical attributes of resilience in Chinese cities warrants the active remaking of the state regime, especially through the design and enforcement of a more resilience-minded planning framework.

Fostering the social attributes of resilience

Social connectivity can reflect the interaction between multiple stakeholders. For China’s local reconstruction, the planning process was shaped by the interaction between state actors at both local and higher tiers of government, as well as the residents affected by the earthquakes. Such interaction was primarily mediated through planners in a state-mandated institutional structure for coordination and engagement, given the context of a weak civil society which lacks effective channels for interaction between non-state actors. Although the central state clearly stipulated who should be involved in reconstruction planning, it left details of day-to-day interaction and coordination between the various actors to the discretion of local officials and planners, who enjoyed advantages in terms of attentiveness to local contingencies.

The result is varied levels of connectivity of planners with different agents. Planners rated highly (5.75; PPR = 91.80%) for their engagement with the public and non-state actors, a result consistent with earlier studies (e.g. Chandrasekhar et al., 2014; Song et al., 2017). However, there are doubts that intense engagement necessarily means effective engagement, because some local resident reconstruction committees, a key platform through which planners reached out to local residents, only consisted of village leaders and could not represent well the voice of ordinary villagers. Planners also gave a relatively higher score (5.15; PPR = 80.32%) for communication with local governments, since the post-earthquake environment makes the interactions (e.g. data sharing) with state agents such as the Earthquake Bureau and the Land Department much more frequent and effective than they otherwise would be.⁸

Conversely, planners’ connections with donor governments under the PAP were only graded a relatively low 4.93 (PPR = 73.77%). To elaborate, the more critical planners we interviewed felt that extraterritorial interests (e.g. outside planners, PAP partners and architects), while important in financial aid and technical backing, added difficulties to an already-complicated planning environment. Their problems include, inter alia, a poor understanding of local culture, the inclusion of land-consuming facilities not useful to the native community and the application of planning solutions not attentive to the local environment. A few planners commented that the two architectural masterpieces in Yingxiu, Paul Audreu Academic Exchange Centre for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation and Ieoh Ming Pei’s Youth Activity Centre, both built with donations, were barely used after completion. This meant an unnecessary waste of land and added to the severity of land shortage. Several respondents also highlighted the social inflexibility of spatial planning. As one of them sighed, ‘the building design and spatial arrangement for Yingxiu could be better if we paid adequate heed to the habits of local residents’.

At first glance, capital building is a palpable dimension of reconstruction planning. Respondents reported an average of 4.84 (PPR = 60.66%; see below) and 5.74 (PPR = 91.80%) respectively when asked to score the extent to which they helped the local population build adaptive behaviours against future disasters and achieve long-term sustainability via new plans. A few interviewees cited examples of improvement in local planning capacity due to the PAP, notwithstanding the foregoing concerns about local insensibilities. For one local planner in Wenchuan, while reconstruction was mostly performed by external experts and mediated through the state system:

it did build our planning capacity. Prior to the earthquake, we did not have the chance to work with world-famous architects or China’s top planners. During the reconstruction process, we were engaged in a long process of learning. This enabled the establishment of the Wenchuan Planning Department.⁹

Planners responsible for reconstruction are learning too, by drawing lessons from their experience in Wenchuan. Several planners expressed that they had learnt how to better coordinate resources from multiple sources, take advantage of local assets to form social capital, pay more respect to indigenous culture and increase interdepartmental awareness of needed actions. These experiences have greatly benefited subsequent post-disaster reconstructions for Yushu and Lushan.

Moreover, reconstruction raised local capacity for risk management, which helped the local population better cope with several secondary disasters after 2008. In this sense, affected communities became more adaptive not in spite of adversities but because of them. Our fieldwork revealed subtler effects. Local officials, planning professionals and residents became more aware of seismic risks, of where the causative faults were located, of how the ground behaves, of which zones and buildings are most vulnerable, of the need for strong social bonds and of the probability of experiencing damaging earthquakes and mudslides. Throughout the planning process, all those involved grew to understand the importance of disaster safety. Schools in Weizhou, for instance, have rescheduled their school terms to avoid rainy seasons when geological risks are high. Disaster drills have been established and have saved lives in a few secondary disasters. Every responsible government official is equipped with a walkie talkie in case of emergency. Although difficult to measure, this is not an insignificant achievement. Communities and individuals are increasingly enrolled in a state-mandated ‘frameworks of action’ to manage radical uncertainty.

However, most planners acknowledged the failure to enable local communities to self-organise in response to uncertainties. As the low PPR (60.66%) on the development of adaptive behaviours suggests, a notable share of respondents doubted that they had helped build up the self-help abilities of the local population. They agreed that under the current socio-political system, local populations relied primarily on state leadership and resources for both immediate relief and long-term development. A planner who joined the reconstruction in Lushan specifically mentioned the need to ‘produce blood’ (zao xue), or nurture endogenous social capital. It appears that the focus of the reconstruction planning was less on building the adaptive capacities of communities than on reducing their physical vulnerabilities.

However, ‘producing blood’ in a weak civil society requires state assistance. Besides (re)constructing the market, Yang (2009) argues that (re)building the capacity of strong grassroots organisations to face uncertainty is an essential government strategy. Such ‘(re)construction’ and ‘(re)building’ are both fostered through state policies such as redeploying cadres (both bureaucrats and professionals) to work in affected communities, channelling investment from better-off regions to the worst-hit areas, capitalising upon the PAP and recruiting university graduates and volunteers to enrich the grassroots working force. Consequentially, some risk management responsibilities originally internalised in the national state are being purposely externalised by the state to localised spaces of governance, ranging from local governments to communities and individuals.

Another important social attribute of resilience is flexibility, which is often associated with planning practices appreciating and adapting to geographical differences and temporal changes (Table 1). Many of those surveyed and interviewed agreed that they were mindful of indigenous culture, socio-economic specificities and spatial uniqueness. However, a few respondents felt that this attribute had not been well thought-out. One informant who had joined Yushu reconstruction commented that while planners were attentive to local conditions, they were sometimes constrained by the top-down zoning standards and land use requirements, and unable to attend sufficiently to local traditions (see also Guo, 2012). Nonetheless, planners gave a remarkably high average score of 5.57 (PPR = 90.16%) for the capacity of the planning regime to flexibly redefine itself in the face of emergency, by tactics such as simplifying the planning procedure, re-inventing institutional structure to mediate multiple interests and mobilising nationwide planning resources (Qiu, 2018).

For innovation, the last social attribute of resilience, those surveyed and interviewed gave a score of 4.61 (PPR = 55.74%). This is not a high score, presumably due to the non-innovative focus of physical recovery in the planning process. Nonetheless, our interviews and field investigation reveal that planners did think creatively about how to rebuild (‘bounce forward’) to overcome local difficulties and improve the situation. It was indeed the central government that saw reconstruction as a favourable occasion to modernise the society (Johnson and Olshansky, 2016). This state-led effort has been effective in leading public and market investments to defined strategic areas such as urban–rural integration (Peng et al., 2014), poverty reduction (Dalen et al., 2012) and economic restructuring (Qiu, 2018). As planners who rebuilt Yingxiu’s economic system reflected, the state has turned the disruption into an opportunity for doing something new and innovative:

The future development pathway was seriously pondered. Instead of relying on hydrologic power generation, mining and transportation as in the old days, we envisioned the new Yingxiu to be a tourism destination for patriotism and earthquake education, and made specific plans accordingly. Significant ruins were preserved; an earthquake memorial hall was built; local youths were trained to become tourism practitioners; and residents started to make a living through opening lodgings, restaurants and souvenir shops.¹⁰

Such thinking to ‘rebuild better’ is also evident in the reconstruction of Lushan and Yushu. Innovative tactics were also used to cope with land shortage through re-defining the existing institutional structure. One example cited by a few interviewees is the demarcation of an industrial park in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, to accommodate industries relocated from the earthquake-affected region. The revenues were contracted to be shared between the originating region and Chengdu. An official recognised that ‘such practice is novel and had never been seen before’.¹¹ We are cautious that some of these moves have not worked as intended: for example, Sorace (2017) observes that Yingxiu’s tourism industry has failed to prosper solely based on earthquake tourism. Nonetheless, these setbacks should not be taken to deny the presence of a high degree of vision- and direction-setting for socio-economic growth through institutional innovation and the strategic placement of investment (Qiu, 2018).

Conclusion

This article has endeavoured to contribute to the ongoing debates on the state–society relationship in resilience building by drawing attention to the relevance of the state. Having evolved from a physical science concept to a socio-ecological governance ideal, resilience has gained traction in both scholarship and the policy arena with two definable trends. One is a shift from the prime concern with external threats to internal coping and adaptive capacity. The other is a change of focus from physical infrastructure provision to societal capacity building in response to disturbances. These two trends seem to assume, as many scholars have concurred, that the resilience paradigm is at odds with strong state regulation.

Opposing this view, this article joins a growing rank of scholars to argue that the practice of resilience is indeed path-dependent, such that it might depend on the active intervention and remaking of the state in places where the state has endeavoured to maintain strong socio-economic control. At issue here is how the balance of state powers and competencies, pressures and incentives both enable and constrain the resilience of local communities. In so arguing, we are not denying the necessity for individuals and communities to make themselves less vulnerable to future catastrophe. What we simply want to emphasise is the need to pay close attention to the important role of the state and the politicised nature of resilience. Our arguments are elaborated through an empirical study of China’s state-led reconstruction planning. This is based on an online questionnaire survey with planners to gauge the degree of resilience during the planning process, followed by a series of interviews with various stakeholders to unravel how the state, through its planning regime, enables and constrains resilience.

We have two key observations. First, the Chinese state not only plays a nudging role in the reconstruction of earthquake-stricken communities, but also becomes an active and unparalleled agent. Tasks such as relocating damaged communities, resettling affected residents, selecting future development paths and nurturing the adaptive capacity of communities all require the input of the state, whose political authority to mobilise various socio-economic resources cannot be matched by other agents. To accomplish these tasks, the state also reinvents its structures and practices, such as simplifying planning procedures, breaking administrative boundaries to relocate factories from high-risk areas while securing profits for the original areas, and sending cadres to work in disaster-devastated regions to foster local planning capacity. To say that the state is active in the reconstruction process does not, however, imply that it takes responsibility for every aspect of it. Once the principal guarantor of welfare and redistribution, the central government has become predominantly concerned with orchestrating multiple agents to fulfil its reconstruction objectives. It is only responsible for around 30% of the total reconstruction cost, whereas the remainder is met by a combination of funds from the local governments, the PAP, as well as various non-state sources, such as social fundraising, bank loans, capital market financing, overseas contingency loans and enterprises (Xie, 2015).

Second, through its regulation of the reconstruction planning process, the Chinese state heavily shapes the formation and development of both the physical and social attributes of resilience of earthquake-stricken communities. While resilience is not explicitly expressed in reconstruction planning documents, signs of resilience are evident to varying degrees. The reconstruction plans we examined carry an overarching emphasis on two physical attributes, robustness and efficiency, forming a classic checklist for engineering resilience. Robustness was achieved through structural resistance, actions of territorial prevention and tactics of protective buffering, while efficiency was attained through rapid planning responses and quick recovery of normalcy. These resilience attributes were enshrined because they are mandated by the state’s preventive-minded planning framework. Conversely, the signs of three other physical attributes conveying ecological resilience – diversity, redundancy and physical connectivity – are much less evident. Since they are not required in the state regulatory regime, they received less attention in the planning process. An exception is in the reconstruction of Yingxiu, where planners intentionally applied tools such as mixed land use, functional diversity, polycentric urban form and spare capacity to accommodate future disruption – an example of planners filling the regulatory vacuum with their professional discretion. For social attributes signifying evolutionary resilience, our study reveals mixed achievements. Planners developed strong social connectivities with state agencies and engaged more frequently with local residents, but expressed concerns about working effectively with donor governments unfamiliar with local needs. The central state’s engineering-minded planning framework drove planners to focus more on recovery and community vulnerabilities than on local capital building for adaptation to uncertainties. Its one-size-fits-all planning standards also discouraged flexible planning responses to site-specific needs. Reconstruction was seized by the central state as an opportunity to promote innovation in the socio-economic development trajectory of the affected communities, but some innovative attempts, such as earthquake tourism, fail to benefit the people as promised.

Based on these observations, what is at stake is how state powers can be geared towards enabling the resilience of the society. Although current reconstruction planning in China shows signs of resilience, it may owe less to the inherent merits of the planning requirements prescribed by the state than to planners’‘make-do’ spirit in addressing the urgent need for socio-economic recovery. In many ways, the shift towards a more resilient society in China requires the refinement of planning mechanisms and standards to respect a community’s unique needs and the establishment of a mechanism to channel state resources to help individuals and communities develop their adaptive capacity. It is the roots and implications of this intricate state–society relationship of resilience building that demand more scholarship.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (grant number CUHK14413014).

ORCID iD

Jiang Xu

Notes

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