Understanding and Strengthening the Emergency Management and Comprehensive Disaster Reduction in China’s Rural Areas: Lessons from Coping with the COVID-19 Epidemic

Abstract

Community based bottom-up design is the foundation of national emergency management system. The outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic in early 2020 is a major test of emergency management capability in rural China. This paper first describes the necessity of strengthening the emergency management design in rural areas of China. Then this paper introduces the fundamental role of emergency management design based on bottom-up for the security of rural areas in China, especially in improving the level of comprehensive disaster reduction at the grassroots level, which plays an important role in improving the emergency management ability of China’s rural areas. Based on the above analysis, this paper takes the COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control of epidemic in rural areas of China as an example, and find out many problems in China’s rural emergency management system, such as the grass-roots government’s emergency needs cannot be met, the existing mode of systematic lack, the lack of psychological intervention and so on. Finally, this paper proposes to strengthen the emergency management design in China’s rural areas from expanding the scope of emergency management subjects, strengthening the systematic design of rural emergency management system and strengthening the psychological intervention in rural areas.