The literature on crisis management reports that crises can be critical for organizations, including state and extra-state actors; they either break down or reinvent themselves. Successful organizations, those that do not break down, use situations of crisis to restructure themselves and improve their performance. Applicable to all crises, this reasoning is also valid for the COVID-19 pandemic and for government organizations in China. Drawing on documentary analysis, this article examines China's pandemic response from the social-political, technological and psychological perspectives using a holistic crisis management framework. It demonstrates that the Chinese state bureaucracy has assembled, expanded and strengthened its surveillance strategies to strive for comprehensive crisis response.