Abstract
China’s Crisis Management, edited by Jae Ho Chung, delivers a comprehensive overview of crisis management in China. Indeed, the book’s table of contents reads like a Chinese administrator’s worst nightmare: subjects include economic, political, military, and ethnic crises as well as epidemic, environmental, and natural disasters. The book addresses the question of how the Chinese government, in the face of such a diverse range of crises, has maintained power and stability. Specifically, each chapter examines the history, organization, learning effects, and norms of managing crises as well as the degree to which Beijing is prepared to deal with future crises.
Wei Zhang’s opening chapter very effectively explores the effectiveness of China’s macro-economic management. Zhang highlights the swift and decisive actions taken by the Chinese government to minimize the effects of the external shock of the worldwide economic crises that began in 2007. Drawing comparisons with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, Zhang convincingly explains the factors that made Chinese anti-crisis macro-economic policy so successful, as well as projecting the ways in which these policies may limit China’s future growth. The editor’s contribution in the second chapter deals with the prospects of a political crisis in China, specifically narrowing in on organized collective protests as the surest gauge and source of social and political instability. Chung finds strong evidence for rising frequency, violence levels, and magnitude of collective protests in China, and also a central government and Communist Party with ‘exceptional viable strategies’ (p. 36) for managing these domestic crises that include three aspects: prevention, monitoring, and containment. The result is what Chung refers to as ‘stable instability’, with collective protest becoming almost routine but not reaching the point of threatening the government.
Chapter 3 by Tuosheng Zhang overviews each of the military crises and near crises experienced by the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 2004. The author’s word choice in several instances unfortunately brings into question the neutrality of the narrative (Taiwan’s ‘plots’, ‘Japan’s unreasonable demands’) and the summary would benefit from the inclusion of incidents since 2004. In spite of these issues, Zhang’s summary and subsequent analysis do provide a useful picture of how Chinese military crisis management has evolved over the years. Colin Mackerras makes an important contribution in Chapter 4 in which he analyses a subcategory of collective protests that he rightfully calls one of China’s top imperatives – the management of ethnic crises. Mackerras’s analysis focuses on four major ethnic crises in Tibetan areas and Xinjiang, exploring in depth the internal and external management of the crises by the government in both the long and short term. He concludes that China’s management of ethnic crisis has successfully reduced the likelihood of national collapse, even if the goal of ‘harmonious society’ still remains elusive.
In Chapter 5, Hongyi Lai very effectively intersperses his analysis of the legal framework behind the management of epidemics in China with examples of how those policies actually played out before and after the crucial SARS crisis of 2003. His analysis highlights a key issue that threads throughout the whole book of whether the authoritarian nature of China’s government impairs or facilitates effective crisis management. Comparing the SARS and H1N1 epidemics, Lai finds that though it was initially a hindrance, once the Chinese authorities understood the situation, they were able to become effective epidemic fighters. Richard P. Suttmeier, analyzing environmental and industrial disasters in Chapter 6, also refers to 2003 as a watershed moment in the progression of Chinese crisis management. While pointing out China’s impressive ability to mobilize resources in the face of crisis, he also finds a number of weaknesses in the Chinese model, most notably failure at ‘pre-event risk reduction and post-event policy implementation’ (p. 124). In the concluding chapter, Gang Chen makes a similar analysis of the evolution of China’s management of natural disasters, though he takes a much broader historical view, tracing Chinese policy from the dynastic era to the establishment of new norms in the last 30 years. While noting the enormous progress made in this time, Chen finds that ‘the government is still playing an overwhelming role in disaster management’ making it difficult to maintain efficiency and transparency and well as impeding non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from effectively joining the effort.
In my opinion, understanding China’s approach to crisis management opens a window on the often murky inner workings and philosophy of the Chinese government. Jae Ho Chung has brought together a fantastic group of authors who together present a comprehensive analysis of China’s increasingly sophisticated crisis management systems. I strongly recommend this book to academics interested in the Chinese Communist Party’s governing philosophy and ability to survive as well as practitioners seeking to understand how their organizations can better achieve success in working with the Chinese government.