Researching disasters and disaster management in China: Persistent questions and emerging trends

Abstract

<p>This article offers an introduction to the China Information’s special issue on disasters and<br />disaster management. It is argued here that studying disasters and disaster management<br />should not only improve our understanding of them as social phenomena and thereby<br />increase our ability to manage disasters better, but also that disasters offer unique<br />windows for researchers to study Chinese society and explain social and political<br />changes therein. The article further argues that although research in natural disasters in<br />China has developed rapidly both in terms of disciplinary approaches and topics, such<br />research has still to overcome its narrow event-based nature and embrace more crossdisciplinary<br />and comparative approaches geographically and historically, and disaster<br />studies should investigate different types of disasters.<br /></p>