Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Feb 25;16(2):e0247383. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247383. eCollection 2021.
The Chinese government's early handling of COVID-19 has been perceived as aggressive and oppressive. Many of the most radical measures were adopted in Henan province, immediately north of Hubei, the pandemic's epicentre in China. However, little is known about how rural residents-a group systematically disadvantaged in Chinese society-responded to authorities' draconian restrictions.
To understand the lockdown measures and rural community responses at the grassroots level, face-to-face interviewers were conducted with both village cadres and villagers from two Henan villages in May and June 2020. The interviews were analysed with qualitative content analysis methods, with the coding process guided by the concepts of resilience, vulnerability and adaptability from the literature on disaster risk reduction.
We found that the lockdown measures were indeed radical and disproportionate relative to the level of risk presented; however, they were largely accepted by villagers. This contradiction can be explained by two key contributing factors: (i) shared interests of individual villagers and the converged goal of government and civil society, and (ii) tacit flexibility in COVID-19 adaption strategies to tackle conflict resulting from goal diversion between citizens and local governments.
These findings highlight the nuances of ground-level politics. Despite their 'radical' nature, the lockdown measures were not implemented as simple top-down coercion. Instead, they involved, importantly, the bottom-up, localised response of villagers, and they were negotiated and adapted according to local circumstances.
中国政府对 COVID-19 的早期处理被认为是激进和压迫性的。许多最激进的措施是在中国疫情中心湖北省北部的河南省采取的。然而，人们对农村居民（在中国社会中系统处于劣势的群体）如何应对当局严厉的限制措施知之甚少。
为了了解基层的封锁措施和农村社区的反应，我们于 2020 年 5 月和 6 月在河南的两个村庄对村干和村民进行了面对面访谈。使用定性内容分析方法对访谈进行了分析，编码过程受到减灾文献中关于复原力、脆弱性和适应性的概念的指导。
我们发现，与所呈现的风险水平相比，封锁措施确实是激进和不成比例的；然而，它们在很大程度上被村民所接受。这种矛盾可以用两个关键因素来解释：（i）村民个人利益与政府和公民社会的共同目标之间的一致性；（ii）在 COVID-19 适应策略中存在隐性灵活性，以解决公民与地方政府之间目标分歧所产生的冲突。
这些发现突出了基层政治的细微差别。尽管封锁措施具有“激进”的性质，但它们并不是简单的自上而下的强制实施。相反，重要的是，村民们进行了自下而上的本地化响应，并且根据当地情况进行了协商和调整。
