This article analyzes Taiwan’s National Epidemic Prevention Team, a collective synergy between government and society in fighting COVID-19. We draw on a model of collaborative governance to dissect the collaboration between National Epidemic Prevention Team members; that is, central government, local governments, private enterprises and citizens. We argue that the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, democratic deepening and continual diplomatic isolation despite the global health crisis contributed to Taiwan’s National Epidemic Prevention Team capacity and cohesiveness. Our analysis contributes to the heated discourse on democratic resilience in these turbulent times, suggesting that outbreak control can succeed only if there is an integrated system of interdepartmental, central–local, intersectoral and citizen–state collaboration. Overall, this article shows how liberal democracies can control and counteract COVID-19 without resorting to authoritarian methods of containment.

The eastern terminations of the Himalayan orogeny, named Namche Barwa, are considered a vital natural laboratory in the Tibetan plateau for geodynamics due to its distinctive geological and geomorphological characteristics. Magnetotelluric (MT) data measured at 83 sites around the Namche Barwa are imaged by three‐dimensional (3‐D) inversion to better reveal the crustal structure of the eastern Himalaya. The results show a complex and heterogeneous electrical structure beneath the Namche Barwa. The electrical conductors distributed in the middle and lower crust around the Namche Barwa provide additional evidence for the “crustal flow” model if they are considered as some parts of the flow in a relatively large‐scale region. The near‐surface resistivity model beneath the inner part of Namche Barwa conforms with the locations of hot spring and fluid inclusions, the brittle‐ductile transition, and the 300°C–400°C isotherm from previous hydrothermal studies. Relatively resistive upper crust (>800 Ωm) is underlain by a more conductive middle to lower crust (<80 Ωm). The electrical characteristics of the thermal structure at shallow depth indicate an accumulation of hydrous melting, a localized conductive steep dipping zone for decompression melting consistent with the “tectonic aneurysm” model for explaining the exhumation mechanism of metamorphic rocks at Namche Barwa. The results also imply that both surface processes and local tectonic responses play a vital role in the evolution of Namche Barwa. An alternative hypothesis that the primary sustained heat source accounts for the local thermal‐rheological structure beneath Namche Barwa is also discussed.

PurposeA debate emerged among members of public administration academia soon after COVID-19 appeared on the roles and measures that governments ought to deploy to prevent infection. One prevalent discourse is the strength of “strong government” in the fight against the virus—the administrative capacity to launch prompt, appropriate and effective actions that entail collaboration with citizens. A notable development in governance is that new public management (NPM) principles, such as the value of money and the pluralisation of service delivery, are gradually put aside when governments urgently need to curb the spread of infection. The roles of bureaucracy and centralised action are re-emphasised in the policymaking and implementation of anti-epidemic measures. Such a trend allows us to examine if the COVID-19 public health crisis has fundamentally reversed the trend of government retreat in public service within neoliberal regimes since the 1980s.Design/methodology/approachFor this research, the authors selected two “strong governments” in Asia—Hong Kong and Taiwan—by showing how administrators outline their anti-pandemic strategies, examining the role of government in coordinating responses and how bureaucracy interacts with the other two key domains of the governance mechanism: civil society and the market. These two offshore Chinese capitalist economies and pluralistic societies are perceived to have “strong government capacity” in the fight against COVID-19, presumably as a key attribute to their success confining the spread of infection during the early stages of the first outbreak. Both societies reported low infection rates and low mortality rates until September 2020. The authors browsed databases developed by scholars (Cheng et al., 2020; Hale et al., 2020) and referred to two “rubrics” to assess and compare government actions in both places in response to COVID-19. The authors itemised, categorised and counted the policy actions in both places according to the rubrics, noticed that the policy footprint appeared in over two-thirds of indicators of proactive government interventions and identified double-digit counts in nearly half of the categories.FindingsThe authors found that both governments attempted to establish strong stewardship and quick measures to contain the infection. The pattern of “strong government” is, however, not the same as that superficially exhibited. Taiwan took limited steps to regulate business activities but proactively intervened and coordinated the supply of hygienic utilities. Hong Kong launched aggressive attempts to reduce human mobility but remained non-active despite the “face mask run” in society. The “strong government” aspect also received divergent reactions from society. There was extensive cross-sectoral collaboration under the centralised “National Team” advocacy in Taiwan, and there has been no record of local infection for over 10 months. The Hong Kong government was repeatedly doubted for its undesirable stewardship in anti-epidemic measures, the effectiveness of policy interventions and the impartiality of law enforcement. Spontaneous actions during the health crisis from civil societies and private markets were noted, but they seemed uncoordinated with official attempts.Originality/valueThe initial findings enable us to rethink correlations between state capacity and legitimacy in the fight against the virus and its development post-COVID-19. Apparently, Taiwan and Hong Kong demonstrated a “re-expansion” of their public sector during the public health crisis, but not in the same format. This can be understood based on their varying regime values and administrative systems. The pandemic has been a catalyst, pushing both regimes back to their original track of public administration establishments. The concept of “path dependence” might explain the initial development and project the longer-term transformation of the public sector in both places.

With recent advances in the power of computers, three-dimensional (3-D) inversion has become a widely used tool for magnetotelluric (MT) data interpretation (Miensopust, 2017). Some of the most widely used 3-D inversion strategies include the model-space Occam method, the data-space Occam method, the Gauss-Newton (GN) method, the Gauss-Newton with the conjugate gradient (GN-CG) method, the non-linear conjugate gradient (NLCG) method, the quasi-Newton (QN) method and some variants modified from them (Siripunvaraporn, 2012 and references therein), among which the Occam and the GN-CG methods are derived from the GN method. Each of these strategies is feasible for 3-D inversion of MT data and the efficiency of a particular algorithm depends largely on the code implementation. Our inversion utilizes the NLCG algorithm which has low memory requirements and a relatively fast convergence rate (Newman & Alumbaugh, 2000).With a few exceptions, previously developed algorithms for the 3-D inversion of MT data only considered an Earth model with an isotropic resistivity structure. While this assumption is often valid, there are some

Using the staggered-grid finite difference method, a numerical modeling algorithm for a 3D arbitrary anisotropic Earth is implemented based on magnetotelluric (MT) theory. After the validation of this algorithm and comparison with predecessors, it was applied to several qualitative and quantitative analyses containing electrical anisotropy and a simple 3D prism model. It was found that anisotropic parameters for ρ 1 , ρ 2 , and ρ 3 play almost the same role in affecting 3D MT responses as in 1D and 2D without considering three Euler's angles α S , α D , and α L . Significant differences appear between the off-diagonal components of the apparent resistivity tensor and also between the diagonal components in their values and distributing features under the influence of 3D anisotropy, which in turn help to identify whether the MT data are generated from 3D anisotropic earth. Considering the deflecting effects arising from the inconsistency between the anisotropy axes and the measuring axes, some strategies are also provided to estimate the deflecting angles associated with anisotropy strike α S or dip α D , which may be used as initial values for the 3D anisotropy inversion. [Figure: see text]