Suchergebnisse

"Dali L. Yang's Fateful Choices offers a penetrating study of China's management of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a momentous event that has reverberated globally as the severe pandemic in a century. Yang's work sheds light on the advantage Chinese health decision-makers had, including access to the novel coronavirus's genomic sequences from several laboratories, as early as the end of December 2019. It was at this time that an emergency action program was initiated to combat the burgeoning outbreak in Wuhan"--

China's leadership has promoted its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, deploying lockdowns and other aggressive measures to keep cases and deaths low, as a demonstration of the superiority of its Communist party-state system compared with the pandemic performance of other forms of government around the world. But the zero-COVID approach has come with heavy economic and social costs that have become more visible with the spread of more transmissible variants of the virus. These costs, and the party-state's unyielding approach of turning pandemic control into a militaristic national campaign, culminated in the long lockdown of Shanghai—a veritable siege—in the spring of 2022.

China's pursuit of rapid growth has gone hand-in-hand with the development and elaboration of a stability maintenance regime. If there is a China model, then a key element of that model is the stability maintenance regime. This article traces the origins and evolution of the multiple institutions that make up this regime and reveals a confluence of technocratic leadership and organizational factors that have shaped the character and dynamics of this regime, including its intensification in the 2000s. - As successive leaders of the regime have turned to seemingly rigorous mechanisms of measurement, discipline and control to curb petitions, reduce crime or improve court efficiency, all in the name of preserving stability, they also sowed the seeds of various forms of excesses. There have been efforts to address some of the most glaring abuses in recent years but the regime continues in the era of Xi Jinping, torn between a strong preoccupation with stability and a desire to promote law-based governance. (J Contemp China/GIGA)