The Research On Emergency Management Capability Of Government At County-level To Cope With Mass Disturbances

At present, China’s society is being a transformational period. In the process of theeconomic and social transformation, various long-term cumulative conflicts and newproblems start to emerge at some degree, leading to frequent mass disturbances. In fact, massdisturbances have taken place mostly at county-level region in recent years. As it happens,most of those riots manifested one common feature，which the riots occurred before arelargely as a result of inadequate emergency management capability of basic-level government.Specifically, protesters met with callous and indifferent at the beginning of fatal incidents.Vulnerability was exacerbated gradually due to official negligence for the masses’ anger orrancor. With escalation of the situation, the governments at county level are forced by thefuror to uphold stability and prevent disorder, but severe contingency management capabilitygaps constraints the effort of uphold stability，resulting in further deterioration and even themanagement effectiveness backfired. Therefore, it has great practical significance to exploreand research into several effective approaches to pay attention on improvement andenhancement of grassroots government’s emergency management capability.This paper strives to look at this issue and find a way to take it forward through literatureresearch, case analysis and comprehensive analysis, the method of using management,political science, public administration, social theory and methods of physics and psychology.The main work of this paper can be divided five parts: In the first part, it would give an overview of core concepts and relevant theoriesinvolved in this article. The most important contribution of this part is to analyze several keyconcepts, such as “mass disturbance”, county-level government ability and county-levelgovernment emergency management capability, and meanwhile to depict an integrated andcomprehensive perspective named “vulnerability-capability” theory and mass disturbancemechanism in basic-level administrative region.In the second part, it would specify the occurrence mechanism of “2008Wen’ an riot onJune28” through the story unfold and specific interventions by the government againstprotesters. This section can be classified as three segments, the riot’s incentive and origin, theescalation of tensions with the response of the local government accordingly and theirsolutions to make the situation calm and handle the aftermaths.In the third part, it is composed of a series of analysis from multi-perspective viewpointsbased on “vulnerability-capability” theory. Firstly, it would point out that Wen’an, Guizhoulocal public had high-level inherent vulnerability during the mass disturbance period. Besides,the rest of this section would focus on observing the failure causes of local authority response,which was the main reason leading to the riots, by using systematic and dynamic analysis onthe basis of emergency management capability for dealing with such a mass incident.In the fourth part, it would make recommendations that adapt to China’s specificsituation and policy by the experience summary and theoretical analysis of public securitygovernance of basic-level government in United States and Hong Kong. Lastly, the section may be considered as the complement and extension of the third partand the fourth part. Based on the research above, aiming at the weaknesses in contingencymanagement capability of Wen’an bureaucracy and referring to beneficial experience fromdeveloped nations and regions，this part would propose suggestions and solutions onemergency management capability improvement of Chinese government at county level foravoiding or better handling mass disturbances. Specifically, there are six solutions to the mainissue discussed in the section, improving the credibility of the county-level government,enhancing its feed-forward control ability to resolve social tensions, strengthening itsforewarning and pre-control capability, improving its capability of handling riots, fostering itsability to cope with the aftermath of riots and cultivating its crisis public relations capability.