ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Chinese civil servants perceive China’s crisis management efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these perceptions interlink with changing attitudes toward nationalism. The chapter also explains variations in perceived capacity and legitimacy from both the structural and cultural perspectives. Based on a questionnaire survey of Chinese civil servants, the chapter empirically demonstrates that Chinese civil servants perceive better crisis management performance by the Chinese government than Western governments or supranational agencies, especially on the dimension of coordination capability and output legitimacy. The chapter argues that demographic factors, ‘all-of-government and all-of-society’ crisis response mechanisms, and reputation management instruments and cultural preferences for security, performance, and authority explain variations in such perceptions of the efficacy of the response. While the crisis itself resulted in an upsurge in nationalism in democratic countries, the high self-evaluation of crisis management capabilities by Chinese civil servants facilitates and reinforces pre-existing nationalist sentiment among public administrators in an authoritarian context.
