URBAN CHINA AND COVID-19: HOW CHINESE CITIES RESPONDED TO THE PANDEMIC.

• Author: Ren, Xuefei

Cities across the globe have been affected by COVID-19. (1) Their large populations and interconnectivity make them vulnerable to outbreaks of infectious diseases. (2) But the pandemic's impact on cities has varied widely. Some cities have quickly recovered, while others still struggle with record-level infections more than a year into the pandemic. (3) China's cities have fared comparatively well. As early as April 2020, Wuhan, the outbreak's epicenter, declared that it had wiped out all infections, and over the next three months, most other Chinese cities had lifted travel restrictions and resumed economic activity. What kind of measures did municipal governments in China mobilize to control the outbreak? How have these measures been enforced? And given the authoritarian nature of China's political regime, can democracies draw any meaningful lessons from China's local responses?

China's success at containing the pandemic has been attributed to a broad range of strategies. Recent studies cite, for instance, China's distinctive style of crisis management, featuring the top-down command chain led by the Communist Party, as well as effective mobilization of resources, and a high degree of buy-in from the public to comply with the government's orders. (4) Other studies highlight China's resort to its traditional policy toolkit during times of crisis, such as punishing local officials who performed poorly. (5) Yet, others identify additional factors, including the country's manufacturing capacity for producing critical medical supplies, the mobilization of stateowned enterprises, public trust in government, and lessons learned from the past experience combatting SARS. (6)

This essay proposes a different perspective to examine China's responses to the pandemic by focusing on municipal governments. I contend that the core measures implemented by municipal governments--lockdowns, a gridgovernance system, and digital surveillance--reflect a distinctive territorial approach to urban governance. These measures are territorial in that they target territorial jurisdictions, and their enforcement depends on territorial authorities and institutions. (7) Although other countries have used some versions of these tactics, such as lockdowns and digital surveillance, their implementation does not strictly trail administrative jurisdictions, such as municipal boundaries, and is not dependent solely on local territorial authorities.

This essay mines the experiences of local governments in China between January 2020 and May 2021. I've selected a range of cities of different regions, sizes, and levels of economic development. These include Wuhan and several other hotspots, such as Tonghua (Jilin province), Shijiazhuang and Langfang (Hebei province), and Harbin (Heilongjiang province). I also examine Shanghai, which has adopted a more flexible approach to containing COVID-19 that does not rely on strict lockdowns. These examples showcase the great variation in local governments' responses to COVID-19 and challenge the common assumption that China's pandemic strategy has been uniform across the country.

THE GOVERNING SYSTEMS OF CHINESE CITIES

The response of Chinese cities to COVID-19 needs to be understood in the larger context of the Chinese political system, which features both a devolution of the national government's authority to local governments and a consolidation of power at the center. Decentralization, taking place over the last four decades, has empowered municipal governments. And the concentration of authority and resources in Beijing--which has surged under Xi Jinping's rule since 2013--has allowed the party to extend its reach down to the level of cities and neighborhoods. Both features have enabled Chinese cities to act decisively in the pandemic's early phases.

China's fight against COVID-19 has been spearheaded by strong municipal institutions. Unlike Western metropolitan regions typified by fragmented governing structures, most Chinese cities have a consolidated municipal government. Wuhan's handling of the outbreak illustrates the benefits of a single metropolitan authority. A megacity in central China, Wuhan, is home to 20 million people across an area of over 7,000 square kilometers. Nicknamed the "Chicago of China," Wuhan has a governing structure that bears no resemblance to Chicago. Chicago's metropolitan region has more than 1,500 local governments (8); Wuhan is governed by just a single authority. Its municipal government oversees seven urban districts and six rural districts, each headed by a district government. District governments in China are not independent local governments. Instead, they are headed by district leaders appointed by the municipal government and report directly to the mayor. The unified nature of the metropolitan authority minimized fragmentation across localities and enhanced Wuhan's responses to the pandemic. After the initial delay and cover-up in January 2020, the Wuhan municipal government quickly leaped into action, enforcing the strictest lockdown in the country for two and a half months. (9) Wuhan's quick recovery also benefited from the strong intervention of the central government in Beijing. Within weeks of the outbreak, the central government took control. First, in January 2020, it ordered Wuhan to be locked down. It then mobilized resources across the country to help the city, dispatching, for instance, thousands of doctors and military medics to provide needed assistance. To supervise Hubei province, the central government formed the National Steering Group for COVID-19 Prevention and Control. The Steering Group, which was headed by the Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, included senior officials of major ministries to smooth interdepartmental coordination and fast-track decisionmaking. (10) The central government also used the cadre evaluation system to incentivize local officials. Local officials and civil servants signed responsibility statements (zeren shu) to ensure that their jurisdictions had no infections. Officials with strong performance were quickly promoted, while those who performed poorly were removed from their posts." By February 2021, more than 5,000 officials had been removed due to their poor performance over COVID-19 containment. (12) The central government authorized the lockdown...