| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
How crisis-prone is the reform-era Chinese state? Whereas some have characterized it as a regime suffering from a hidden crisis of governance, or instead as one that has responded effectively to critical challenges by redesigning its core institutions, this article examines the political utility of crisis as a mobilizational tool from the Mao era to the present. Using the SARS outbreak of 2003 as a case study, I seek to demonstrate that, in fact, the rhetoric of crisis can help to legitimate extraordinary interventions by social and political elites, subvert the standard bureaucratic procedures that characterize normal politics and create political space for extraordinary mobilizations of resources to overcome challenges. The continuing deployment of crisis rhetoric by the Hu-Wen leadership can thus be read as one legacy of the mobilizational dynamics of the Mao-era state.
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