China’s Crisis Governance and Evolving State-Society Relations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sammanfattning: Existing studies on China’s COVID-19 response have gravitated to a macro-level, formal institutional analysis, focusing either on the effectiveness of the policy in early-stage virus containment or on the growing negative impacts of COVID policy practices on China’s socio-political landscape at the late stage. Using serial interviews accompanied by online observations and documents, this thesis redirects its attention to the micro-level, individual response to China’s crisis governance and COVID policy practices. Informed by Kellee Tsai’s evolutionary framework, it traces Chinese citizens’ changing attitudes towards the policy and its implementation and studies the extent to which such attitudinal changes reflect their perceptions of the state and affect state-society relations in China. The findings of the thesis show that although Chinese citizens displayed growing antipathy towards the zero-COVID policy, it does not necessarily lead to their questioning of the Chinese polity and the party state’s legitimacy. Instead, they are caught in a dilemma of their evolving perceptions of the state and their entrenched, real-life interactions with it, where a trade-off tends to be made based primarily on their calculation of personal interests rather than their improved political literacy.