State Building in Crisis Management
Reflections on Statecraft from the Shanghai Lockdown
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4382142 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ying Wang (0000-0003-3126-1134, corresponding author), Fulong Wu (0000-0003-4938-6066), Fangzhu Zhang (0000-0002-8975-5324) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 126-141 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-1317 • E-ISSN: 1468-2427 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1468-2427.13289 |
| OpenAlex | W4405917815 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 76 |
The exceptional measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic have brought great potential for reconfiguring urban governance. To examine such potential, this article presents how the pandemic crisis was managed in Chinese neighbourhoods. Following a statecraft approach and using Shanghai as a case, we show how a citywide lockdown played out on the ground as a joint product of state apparatus and citizens. Drawing on discourse analysis of interviews, policy documents, and news reports, we probe into Shanghai's contextualized neighbourhood pandemic responses, particularly by emerging neighbourhood voluntary practices in crisis management. We examine how these practices were tactically incorporated into the state's overall responses to the pandemic through co-production, co-option and mobilization. Instead of co-governance, we argue that the grassroots state orchestrates and steers community participation and volunteerism to reinforce grassroots statecraft and consolidate its role in (post-) pandemic neighbourhood governance. Through exceptional crisis management measures, the state penetrates everyday life. This process has facilitated local state-building in urban neighbourhoods, thereby manifesting, perpetuating, and expanding state-centred governance trends that were established well before the onset of Covid
Business · Crisis management · Economic system · Economics · Political science · Politics · State-building · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Computer Science · International Development and Aid · Law · Local Government Finance and Decentralization · Medicine
“Neither from Here nor from There”
Decoding the mental health of informal workers in the Global South
Socio ‐ Spatial Reconfiguration of Rural – Urban Interstices
Party ‐ State Urbanism
Environmental Statecraft and Changing Environmental Politics
Governing resettlement under the new state politics
Managing affordable homeownership in urban China
From entrepreneurial to managerial statecraft
Concessionary governance
Digitally Facilitated Gentrification in Shanghai's Historic Urban Landscapes
Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure
The Politics of Community Building in Urban China
Global China as Method
Grid Governance in China's Urban Middle-class Neighbourhoods
Crisis governance, Chinese style
Co-production, the third sector and the delivery of public services
Revitalizing the State's Urban “Nerve Tips”
Neighbourhood Governance in Urban China
Loyalist-activist networks and institutional identification in urban neighbourhoods
The enabling conditions of post-pandemic city government
Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field
The Covid exception
Collaborative governance in emergencies
Crisis and state transformation
Pandemic and lockdown
Stereotypes, Archetypes, and Prototypes
Participatory governance in China
What makes urban governance co-productive? Contradictions in the current debate on co-production
Policy style, consistency and the effectiveness of the policy mix in China’s fight against Covid-19
A monstrous threat’
Democratizing the Neighbourhood? New Private Housing and Home-Owner Self-Organization in Urban China
Studying Chinese Politics
A Question of Human Rights or Human Left? – The ‘People’s War against Covid-19’ under the ‘Gridded Management’ System in China
Covid-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state
Topologies of power in China’s grid-style social management during the Covid-19 pandemic
Can co-production be state-led? Policy pilots in four Chinese cities
Rethinking China’s urban governance
Municipal statecraft
Responding to Covid-19
Citizen–State Collaboration in Combating Covid-19 in China
Governing homeowner associations in China’s gated communities
Collaborative neighborhood governance and its effectiveness in community mitigation to Covid-19 pandemic
Campaign-style crisis regime
Inventing Ourselves
Community Volunteering as Neoliberal Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin
Land financialisation, planning informalisation and gentrification as statecraft in Antwerp
Urban statecraft
People and plans in urbanising China
Governmentalities in everyday practices
Politicising proximity
Towards a constructed order of co-governance
Everyday urbanism and the everyday state
The variegated role of the state in different gated neighbourhoods in China
From an emerging market to a multifaceted urban society
Territory and power in the United Kingdom
Solidarity, not charity
State territorialization through shequ community centres
Coproducing Responses to Covid ‐19 with Community‐Based Organizations
Participatory micro-regeneration
Crises, crisis-management and state restructuring
The CCP, Campaign Governance and Covid-19
Co-Governance for Accountability
Prosaic geographies of stateness
Authoritarian space-time
Socially Engaged Municipal Statecraft in Urban China? The Shenzhen Biennale as Situated Planning Experiment
Uneven and combined state capitalism
Four Modes of Neighbourhood Governance
The Informal Constitution of State Centrality
Neoliberal disease
Authoritarian state capitalism
Municipal Statecraft For The Smart City
The grid management system in contemporary China
Mutual aid versus volunteerism
Covid-19 and Uncertain Intimacy
Building 'Community
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 10 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |