Institutionalization in the politics of China's disaster management

Abstract

In the study of institutionalization in authoritarian regimes, non-repressive institutional pillars in non-democratic governance are often neglected. Through the research on the People's Republic of China's two rounds of reinstitutionalization in natural disaster management, a life or death issue for all Chinese dynastic regimes, this article aims to make contributions to new institutionalist studies of authoritarianism that help to explain the Chinese Communist Party's 'authoritarian resilience'. Based on analysis of the evolution of China's thematic disaster response plans and disaster management mechanisms in the reform period, the article discusses different institutional imperatives or fundamental challenges the authoritarian institutional designers needed to address before and after the 2008 Sichuan earthquakeand to what extent the institutionalization and reinstitutionalization have been effective in addressing these challenges.