Emergency Management in Urban China: Comparing the Role of Community Institutions in the Coronavirus Outbreak and in Other Disasters

To combat the coronavirus epidemic, the city at the epicentre, Wuhan, China, was placed under strict lockdown in 2020 for 76 days. Unlike past emergency response situations in China, government-organised Residents’ Committees (RC), property management companies, and other community institutions played an unusually prominent role in enforcing the lockdown, providing essential services, and maintaining public order. This article explains the role of community institutions in emergency management in China through case studies of the 2008 earthquake in Chengdu, the 2016 flood in Wuhan, and later, the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. Drawing on databases of media reports and individual accounts, I argue that the administrative and coercive power of community institutions stems from their spatiality—from being embedded in gated residential communities, maintaining contact and familiarity with residents, and having control over physical structures. During earthquakes and floods, when the physical space that give community institutions power is changed and destroyed, the role of these organisations in emergency response diminishes. However, when facing an epidemic, in which structured physical space is not only unchanged but also reinforced, community institutions take the lead.