"Urban Community With A Shared Destiny":A New Interpretive Framework

The initial formation and development of urban communities in China was profoundly influenced by the unitary system and administrative divisions,which defined people within a specific geographical area,making urban communities with a "regional" character naturally lacking the communal attributes of traditional communities.The Chinese urban community has always been regarded as an anonymous and atomised "stranger society",and it is common for people to sweep the snow in front of their own doors,and compared to families and units,people lack a sense of belonging and identification with the community.It is often difficult for people to be mobilised.However,the COVID-19 crisis has broken this situation,as community residents actively cooperate with community-based epidemic prevention and control,consciously quarantine themselves at home,and have a strong sense of autonomy and cooperation in the process of coping with the epidemic,forming to some extent a community of unanimous resistance to the epidemic.It is therefore a central concern of this paper to explore the underlying forces behind the community’s concerted action against the epidemic,as well as the process of its formation and evolution,and to explain the possibility of the concerted action of urban communities from the theoretical level beyond the case experience.A review of existing research reveals that while the boundaries of community research are expanding,the ties that bind communities are also becoming increasingly diverse.The research on the construction of community in Chinese urban communities can be broadly categorised into three paths:"interest-cooperation","emotion-interaction" and "governance-participation".These studies have laid the groundwork for this study.These studies provide a theoretical basis for this research,but it is difficult to provide a more robust explanation for the emergence of communities during the COVID-19 epidemic in China.The empirical facts of the joint fight against the epidemic show that concerted action within the community was not generated by a community of interests based on a rational calculation of people at the material-economic level,nor by the establishment of an emotional community that could be interdependent and deeply emotional in a short period of time,nor by a governance community with multiple participation and shared governance.Therefore,this study proposes a new interpretive framework of "Urban Community with a Shared Destiny" based on the findings of field investigation,in an attempt to explain how united action within communities is possible in situations of major public crisis..In general,this study focuses on the community actions against the epidemic in Wuhan during the COVID-19 crisis.It focuses on the core issue of how concerted community actions against the epidemic were possible,and provides a realistic overview of the concerted community actions against the epidemic in Wuhan during the COVID-19 crisis.At the same time,on the basis of the explanations of individual cases,an attempt is made to go beyond the experience itself and engage in a dialogue with established theories to explore in depth how urban community mobilisation is generated in the current Chinese social context.Specifically,this study finds that the formation of"Urban Community with a Shared Destiny" goes through three stages:"perception-identificationaction".Firstly,in the face of a sudden public crisis,people generally went through a journey from fearlessness to instinctive panic,during which their sense of life began to awaken,sublimating their"perception of life"and starting the phase of individual decentralisation against the epidemic.When the news of "pneumonia of unknown origin" first spread,many people were indifferent and had nothing to do with it,but with the "closure" of Wuhan,people witnessed the severe overcrowding of medical resources and were bombarded with information about the epidemic on the internet.After being bombarded with information on the Internet,people became aware that the new coronavirus could be lurking in every corner of our lives and that we were under constant threat of infection and uncertainty of survival.In this situation,people instinctively fall into a state of panic and rush to buy masks,disinfectant food,etc.,and this panic spreads rapidly on a wider scale.Secondly,the visualisation of life and death under the gloom of the epidemic further stimulated people’s psychological resonance and emotional empathy,and they began to realise that the whole community was related to each other in life and death,and that the"identity of common destiny" was gradually formed,thus entering the initial stage of the community’s joint fight against the epidemic.In the face of the sudden outbreak of a major epidemic,the State took a series of swift actions to ensure that all efforts were concentrated on major issues,mobilising the full force of the Party and beyond.However,due to the limited knowledge of the epidemic and the pressure on the community,there was inevitably a "vacuum" that was difficult for the administrative forces to reach,and the general state of panic created a state of disorder in the community.In this situation,the identification with a common destiny pushed the ’activists’ within the community to take the lead and use their power to mobilise more people to participate in the prevention and control of the epidemic.Finally,through a combination of administrative and autonomous mobilisation,the spontaneous actions of the people within the community gradually grew in scale and were coordinated autonomously,resulting in "concerted action" and an escalation of the community response.The emergence of concerted action against the epidemic was made possible by the widespread recognition that each community was a community of solidarity and shared risk.With this sense of shared destiny,community residents actively participated in the prevention and control of the epidemic through their own actions,consciously quarantining their homes and not causing the country any trouble,and many others risking their lives to actively participate in the community fight against the epidemic.At the same time,this spontaneous response to the epidemic was not an isolated one,but a set of actions was developed within the community,from categorisation and decomposition of tasks to monitoring,and these actions were reinforced by repeated practice and the ongoing experience of sharing a common fate.It was the concerted community action that led to the effective control of the epidemic and the gradual return of community order from the initial chaos of the outbreak.Based on empirical research,this paper aims to engage in a dialogue with established theories at the academic level,to explore the core element that drives the formation of a community community of destiny in crisis response,and to explore strategies for mobilising social forces in public crises at the applied level.The study finds that the key force and linkage that drives the formation of a collaborative response to a crisis is "common destiny",and that the creation of"Urban Community with a Shared Destiny" can effectively counteract a crisis and bring society back to normality quickly.It is worth noting that although the "Urban Community with a Shared Destiny" is time-sensitive,in the context of risk society,the potential crisis of risk may be transformed into a crisis at any time,threatening our survival and development.Therefore,the response to future public crises can be guided according to the process and characteristics of the"Urban Community with a Shared Destiny",so that a strong and efficient social force can be quickly assembled.