Chinese citizens’ participation in COVID-19 prevention and control has made great contributions to the successful fight against the pandemic. The factors that have impacted citizens’ participation have rarely been reported based on both social–psychological and political environmental theories. This paper presented a study to explore the determinants of Chinese citizens’ participation in COVID-19 prevention and control based on a combined model of the theory of planned behavior, the norm activation model, and political opportunity structure theory. A dataset involving 463 respondents from Harbin in northeast China was acquired and analyzed. The results showed that the comprehensive model explained 62.9% of the total variance in citizens’ participation behavior. The openness to public participation not only significantly directly influenced citizens’ participation but also indirectly affected participation behaviors through attitude and perceived behavioral control, both of which were important mediators and had the greatest overall impacts. The awareness of consequences and subjective norms were crucial antecedents to the activation of other influencing factors. Personal norms indirectly affected participation behavior through the mediation of attitude. The empirical results showed the comprehensiveness, effectiveness, and high explanatory power of the postulated model. The study also provides both new theoretical perspectives for explaining public participation and useful practical implications for future policy development in promoting citizens’ participation in public health emergency management.

Community plays a crucial role in the successful prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. However, evaluation of community capability to fight against COVID-19 is rarely reported. The present study provides a first attempt to assess community capability to combat COVID-19 in Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning province in Northeast China, based on a modified framework of a community readiness model. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ninety key informants from fifteen randomly selected urban communities to collect the data. The empirical results indicate that the overall level of community capability for epidemic prevention and control in Shenyang was at the stage of preparation. The specific levels of the fifteen communities ranged from the stages of preplanning to preparation to initiation. Concerning the level of each dimension, community knowledge about the issue, leadership, and community attachment exhibited significant disparities between communities, while there were slight differences among communities on community efforts, community knowledge of efforts, and community resources. In addition, leadership demonstrated the highest overall level among all the six dimensions, followed by community attachment and community knowledge of efforts. Community resources displayed the lowest level, followed by community efforts. This study not only extends the application of the modified community readiness model to evaluate community capability of epidemic prevention in the Chinese community context, but also offers practical implications for enhancing Chinese communities’ capabilities to deal with various future public health emergencies.