The novel coronavirus epidemic in 2019 hit China at an unprecedented scale and poses huge challenges to all levels of the Chinese government – national, provincial, municipal, and county. To date, February 16, 2020, the epidemic has caused 58,592 people to be infected, 8,228 people suspected of infection, and 1,666 deaths. All 34 provincial territories have been identified with infected cases, and the city of Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, is the center of the epidemic, with 56,249 people infected and 1596 deaths. Guangdong, Henan, Zhejiang, and Hunan provinces all have been identified with more than 1000 infected cases. The epidemic is still raging.
The novel coronavirus epidemic has triggered a massive response in China. At the national level, the Central Committee of the Communist Party created an executive leadership group led by Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping on January 25, 2020 to cope with the outbreak. The National Health Commission has activated the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanisms of the State Council in coordinating with the other 31 ministries and agencies. All provincial, municipal, and county governments have established their own leadership groups and joint prevention and control mechanisms. More than 23,000 medical personnel, including more than 1000 from the People’s Liberation Army, have been sent to Wuhan to improve the medical response capacity, and 19 provinces have been mobilized to provide paired-assistance to the 16 other cities in Hubei province. State-owned companies, private firms, public institutions, and nonprofit organizations all have participated in the response in their own ways.
The response to the epidemic differs significantly in performance from response to other extreme events, although China has created a comprehensive emergency management system to deal with the full range of natural hazards, accidents, public health incidents, and social riots. Compared to the SARS epidemic in 2003, the response to the novel coronavirus is much larger in scale, with many more entities and many more interactions among these entities, creating greater difficulty in achieving coordinated response in dynamically evolving conditions.
Using the theoretical framework of complex adaptive systems (CAS), this study seeks to document how such a massively large-scale response formed and operated to cope with the novel coronavirus epidemic in the centralized administrative context of China. The CAS framework has been applied to the Ebola crisis in 2014 but has not yet been used in the context of China. The Risk, Disaster & Crisis Management Center, Nanjing University has initiated a quick response study and has been working on data collection to trace the response process since December 1, 2019. This study has collected data from multiple sources including situation response reports, newspapers, internet, social media, and interviews with governmental officials at various administrative levels. The novel coronavirus epidemic poses severe threats to global security. China’s response is vital to understanding global response strategies.
