Public Service Resilience on the Cloud: State Mobilization and Digital Self-governance in China
When:
—
Venue:
Online
This project explores how governance patterns matter in crisis response, as well as characteristics of online communities that can contribute to successful and sustainable public service provision during a crisis. Based on interviews, survey responses and online observations of five cases, she finds that the centralized pattern of online collaborations may be efficient at first, while the decentralized pattern is more sustainable over time due to extensive collaboration networks. By furthering the literature on digital governance and collaborative emergency management, she argues that China's response to COVID-19 is clearly influenced by self-governance in the emerging digital civic square. Aside from the public and private sectors, self-organized collaborations within and between online communities provide resilient services to combat the pandemic even under state mobilization in a physically and institutionally constrained environment, which has significant global implications for pre-crisis preparedness and post-crisis institution-building in a broader range of societies.
Dr Xin Han is an Assistant Professor of Political Science & Public Administration at Montana State University. Her research focuses on development, governance and digital politics, examining the evolving human-AI-nature interactive dynamics through an interdisciplinary lens. She is part of DigiCARES, a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States to explore how AI and digital technologies enhance public service resilience and well-being in underserved communities. Her current book project, Interacting for Development: State Mobilization and Social Embeddedness, examines how top-down state intervention and bottom-up public participation evolve and interact to shape varied development and governance outcomes, even when starting conditions are similar. The book focuses particularly on these dynamics within the context of state-led development campaigns.
Contact name:
Chao-Yo Cheng