Understanding and Strengthening the Emergency Management and Comprehensive Disaster Reduction in China’s Rural Areas: Lessons from Coping with the COVID-19 Epidemic

Abstract

Community based bottom-up design is the foundation of national emergency management system. The outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic in early 2020 is a major test of emergency management capability in rural China. This paper first describes the necessity of strengthening the emergency management design in rural areas of China. Then this paper introduces the fundamental role of emergency management design based on bottom-up for the security of rural areas in China, especially in improving the level of comprehensive disaster reduction at the grassroots level, which plays an important role in improving the emergency management ability of China’s rural areas. Based on the above analysis, this paper takes the COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control of epidemic in rural areas of China as an example, and find out many problems in China’s rural emergency management system, such as the grass-roots government’s emergency needs cannot be met, the existing mode of systematic lack, the lack of psychological intervention and so on. Finally, this paper proposes to strengthen the emergency management design in China’s rural areas from expanding the scope of emergency management subjects, strengthening the systematic design of rural emergency management system and strengthening the psychological intervention in rural areas.

Study on the Formation Mechanism of Medical and Health Organization Staff’s Emergency Preparedness Behavioral Intention: From the Perspective of Psychological Capital

“…Globally, China is one of the countries with severe disaster risk situations; all types of accidents, hidden dangers and safety risks are prone to occur frequently and continue to evolve into social crises [5]. In particular, the large-scale spread of COVID-19 in the early stage of the pandemic has caused some shortcomings in China's paramount epidemic prevention and control system, public health emergency management system, etc., especially in prevention and early warning, advance disposal, emergency material reserve supply, and other aspects of the lack of necessary adaptability and response [6,7]. Currently, China is in a critical period of moving from a large developing country to a modern social power; the importance and urgency of people's livelihoods and well-being, and social and economic construction, together put forward higher requirements for the national emergency management level [8].…”

“…Currently, China is in a critical period of moving from a large developing country to a modern social power; the importance and urgency of people's livelihoods and well-being, and social and economic construction, together put forward higher requirements for the national emergency management level [8]. However, the key to excellent emergency management is to strengthen emergency preparedness, which should run through the entire process of dealing with emergencies [7].…”

Gray Measure and Spatial Distribution Exploration of Local Emergency Resilience on Compound Disasters

“…Limited data and uncertainty of data information are the dual characteristics of local emergency resilience measurements of compound disasters. The systematic attribute of disaster resilience [ 51 ], cross-regional [ 52 ] and cross-sector [ 30 , 53 ] cooperation networks, and the importance of strengthening resilience in mountainous [ 35 , 54 , 55 ] and rural [ 28 , 56 , 57 ] areas provides a theoretical basis for the existence of spatial correlation of local emergency resilience.…”

Evaluation and Obstacle Analysis of Emergency Response Capability in China

“…In addition, some other scholars have evaluated the emergency response capacity in China and some regions. Kong and Sun took COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control in rural areas as an example and proposed relevant suggestions in terms of strengthening rural psychological interventions and expanding the scope of emergency management subjects [ 22 ]. Chen M et al constructed 25 indicators for emergency response capacity assessment through target level, criteria level, and sub-criteria level, based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation (FCE) to determine the weights of the indicators as well as to analyze the decision-making issues, and verified the effectiveness of the established system by taking a fire station in Zhengzhou City as an example [ 23 ].…”