Designing Emergency Management: China’s Post-sars Experience, 2003-2012

This book looks at the then-nascent emergency management sector in China, specifically the 2003–2012 period, that arose from the 2003 SARS crisis and subsequently set the stage for its responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Covering not only the amended and new laws and regulations at the national level, the book also includes the rearrangement and creation of the organizational structures, as well as the response plans for individual emergencies that were either recrafted or created during this period. Beyond chronicling the milestones and products of this transformation, this book highlights the key ideas and ideals that guided the various stakeholders, from the governing elites to the policy experts during this process.

The book demonstrates how definitions of emergency management and emergency categories, as well as other ideational objects, were initially either absent or weakly developed, but were refined to the extent that they helped corral disparate actors into China’s new organizational field of emergency management.

Wee-Kiat LIM is Associate Director, Centre for Management Practice at Singapore Management University. Since 2006, Wee-Kiat has been investigating how organizations make sense of, prepare for, and respond to sociotechnical disruptions. His research interests lie at the intersection of risk, disaster, and organization. Besides academic research, he has written and taught cases on organizations that are based in China, Indonesia, and Singapore, covering issues related to innovation, entrepreneurship, crisis management, and governance. Wee-Kiat holds a PhD in Sociology from University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in sociology of disaster and a Bachelor of Communication Studies (Hons.) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore