Crisis Management with Chinese Characteristics: From SARS to COVID-19

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, cases and fatalities were global, varying in number and spikes. Given its unique form of governance, China responded differently from other nations to this public health crisis, notably compared to the United States. An overview is provided as how China as a nation contained the pandemic early, thereby lowering the death rate in the initial stages based on past lessons learned from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic. The public health crisis at such a scale was managed in China at different levels of governance—national, local, and individual. Some lessons of crisis management with Chinese characteristics in waging the “smokeless war without gunpowder” are explored for the current pandemic, which China has learned from fighting SARS. The effectiveness of China’s centralized, top-down model for crisis management, with respect to preventing and confining the spread of SARS in the later stage, is analyzed. Ethnographic field research on SARS reveals that governance at all levels, from local to national, was mobilized simultaneously against SARS in the final stages. China’s centralized power proves effective in navigating manpower to treat patients, eventually controlling the epidemic. Lessons learned from the SARS crisis have a far-reaching impact on China’s public health crisis management, shedding light on controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.