Understanding Chinese government containment measures and their societal impacts

This COVID-19 Rapid Response award is jointly funded (50:50) between the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research. The figure displayed is the total award amount of the two funders combined, with each partner contributing equally towards the project. The WHO database of research on COVID-19 contains 589 studies, the majority of which are on virology, epidemiology and clinical management. Only two (Kavanagh 2020; McCloskey et al. 2020); discuss (but do not report research on) wider governance issues. Yet the Chinese Communist Party leadership's response to the epidemic has been comprehensive well beyond clinical management. It has set up high level coordinating mechanisms across government ministries that have issued hundreds of policy documents setting out containment measures. In this way it has mobilized Party and government organizations across (for example) social care, transport, and policing that reach through local governments into every work place and community. It has used TV, print and social media to communicate measures with the public, while the public have used social media as well as self-organization to respond to measures whether by complaining and criticizing or by supporting and complementing government measures. This project will: systematically compile a database of policy documents (available from Chinese government websites) that set out containment measures as they are evolving through the epidemic; use text and computational analysis of newspapers and social media databases (Weibo Scope and WeChat Scope) we will purchase; and conduct local fieldwork (qualitative interviews) to analyse the societal impacts in urban and rural areas and responses on social media and (focussing on companies, and NGOs and citizens) in four carefully chosen localities (Hubei, Beijing, Guangdong and Anhui). The result will be important and novel resources mapping and assessing Chinese containment measures and their societal impacts, that will be communicated and updated regularly for national and international governments and organizations attempting to tackle COVID-19 around the world.