This book offers a systematic and well-textured case study with keen analytical insights in a comparative framework of the key dimensions of China’s regime responses and crisis management efforts in the aftermath of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Its focus on the rescue-relief-rehabilitation processes should render this book a much welcomed contribution to the Chinese governance, comparative politics, and Asian public administration fields as well as being a highly relevant and directly useful reference work on natural disasters relief and humanitarian aid for international bodies, national regimes and NGOs around the globe. Readers in the academic world and in the public sector will enjoy the rich details and refreshing findings of this illuminating volume that highlights the realpolitik implications with domestic consequences and external impacts of a rising China as a global soft power player with a huge crisis management capacity. The book’s detailed coverage of the PLA’s leading role in post-quake rescue-relief operations have yielded valuable appreciation of the Chinese military’s other vital domestic functions. This has direct bearings on the elevation of natural disaster crisis management capacity into becoming a high priority concern on the China’s national security and societal harmony agenda as well as 21st century developmental strategies.

Ming K. Chan, Stanford University

The unprecedented response by the Chinese public to the tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake has long called for scholarly treatment and analysis. The field is indebted to Professor Lo for this path-breaking initial study which comprehensively explores both the governmental and popular response to the crisis, usefully framing it as a comparative study of crisis management in China, insightfully juxtaposing it to the management of recent other crises as well as the events surrounding the Tangshan earthquake of 1976.

Victor C. Falkenheim, University of Toronto