Event Details

Prof. Wang Zhengxu explores the response by China's political system to large-scale crises, such as the Covid-19 epidemic.

In this talk Prof. Wang first proposes a conceptual framework for understanding political systems – a political system should be understood on two levels, i.e. the ideational and the operational level, respectively. With this framework, he will explain how the Chinese political system is formed and structured, at both levels, while also comparing it to an ideal liberal democracy. He will furthermore examine how the Chinese political system is supposed to respond to giant crises when such crises emerge, and use the Covid-19 epidemic of 2019-2020 as a case study.

WANG Zhengxu is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Politics at Fudan University. Previously, he served as Acting Director and Senior Research Fellow at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham. Professor Wang received his PhD in political science from University of Michigan in 2005. His current research projects include the democratic values of Chinese citizens, institutional changes and political reforms in China’s political system, and politics of governance in China. He has published widely on socioeconomic modernization, value changes, democratization, governance challenges, and leadership and elite politics in China and East Asia. His publications have appeared in Governance, International Review of Sociology, Political Research Quarterly, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Politics, Asian Journal of Public Opinion Research, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Journal of Contemporary China, and others.