Success and Challenges: China’s State Capacity of Popular Mobilization in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world into chaos and disturbed almost all normality in people’s daily lives. Furthermore, this global pandemic of health crises has also put governments at tests; whether or not COVID can be prevented, contained, and controlled has become a pressing issue for governments of different countries worldwide. As the situation develops, different counties have also demonstrated distinctively different practices and methods on how to handle the health crisis, ranging from strict elimination controls to the attempt of herd immunity. Surprising to many, China, being the first country that experienced the hit of COVID, has turned out to be one of the few that successfully contained the spread of the virus within its large population. Although some of China’s practice during the pandemic has been criticized for violating human rights and privacies, it is undeniable that the country did perform well in containing the spread of COVID, especially in 2020 (Serikbayeva et al., 2021). However, global health governance and pandemic management cannot rely on only a few countries for problem-solving. As we gradually enter what is known as the post-pandemic world, a series of new issues and challenges also began to emerge, even for countries with fewer COVID cases, like China. Under a qualitative design, this paper aims to examine and analyze China’s success in the early stages of the pandemic, in terms of state capacity and the use of popular mobilization. Then, this paper would like to discuss and predict some of the challenges that China is facing or likely to face with its zero-tolerance policies in the post-pandemic world.