Civil Society Response to COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparative Study of China, Japan and South Korea

Non-state actors are prominent players to enhance disaster resilience in public health crises. Based on the comparative study of China, Japan and South Korea, this study attempts to illustrate how different governance systems enable/hinder civil society from responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is fair to say that civil society sector has played an essential role in combating the pandemic, either to reinforce the government-led effort or to fill in the void left by the government. For example, we have witnessed the explosive social donations of money and medical supplies, the imperative online counseling, Wuhan2020 open source community for information dissemination, and volunteering to assist citizen’s quarantine and social distancing in China. However, the civil society sector is still constrained by the institutional barriers from scaling its impact in China. While in Japan and South Korea, the long-term collaborations between the government and civil society in disaster relief facilitate the effective mobilization of societal resources. This study not only provides timely information on how the societal resources can be mobilized to relieve the damage of the COVID-19 pandemic but also shows how the institutions in different countries configurate to produce distinctive outcomes of societal responses to the pandemic.