TY  - BOOK
AU  - YIDA Zhai
TI  - The politics of COVID-19: : the political logic of China’s zero-COVID policy
PY  - 2023///
KW  - COVID-19
KW  - LEGITIMACY
KW  - LOCKDOWNS
N2  - From the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in late 2019 until December 2022, China implemented stringent infection prevention and control measures known as the Zero-COVID policy. Western observers and some Chinese intellectuals have questioned this rigid policy, but few studies offer a comprehensive overview of the political reasonings behind it. This article positions the Zero-COVID policy in a broader historical context of the Chinese Communist Party’s regime maintenance, revolutionary legacies, and political mobilisation. It analyses the political reasonings behind this policy from three dimensions: system, actors, and approach, and provides accounts of the politics of the pandemic. The results reveal that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party was caught in a dilemma. The Zero-COVID policy is used to bolster legitimacy of the regime; however, it also set traps in which the Chinese government risked losing the public’s trust.
UR  - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2023.2194322
ER  -