Crisis coordination in centralized regimes: Explaining China's strategy for combatting the COVID-19 pandemic

Based on the existing literature on government policy and crisis management, this article provides an internal-external and vertical-horizontal coordination framework with which to study coordination in a highly centralized regime. Four types of top-down crisis coordination are introduced to explain how resources fragmented among various sectors, regions, levels, and organizations are swiftly mobilized and deployed to support a strong crisis response. The article’s analytical framework is applied to China’s strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how the sequence of coordinative action combined all four types of crisis coordination and how the coordinative measures co-exist in a hybrid and layered pattern, which enables highly centralized regimes to mobilize various resources across the country and achieve their final aim of crisis termination.