Critical Chinese government behavior for swift housing reconstruction programme - The case of Dujiangyan following Wenchuan Earthquake

Abstract

After the massive Wenchuan earthquake, 15.1 million victims were forced to temporarily relocate and the post-disaster reconstruction was urgent and necessary. Subsequently, the Chinese government vigorously promoted a swift reconstruction, which drew worldwide attention from academia and politics. In response, this paper specifically focused on the critical Chinese government behaviors regarding its swift implementation of a housing reconstruction programme. The Dujiangyan case was employed. A field investigation was conducted, and the data from the source in this research, the newspaper “Dujiangyan Express” were collected. Content analysis was adopted to extract news related to housing reconstruction and “R” software was used for the keyword frequency statistics. Accordingly, the frequencies were obtained, and keywords with similar meanings were classified into one keyword cluster. Further, the keyword clusters’ frequencies were analyzed, and the corresponding time points considered. Finally, 14 critical Chinese government behaviors in 4 dimensions were identified: “post-disaster resettlement”, “housing reconstruction”, “disposal for the earthquake-impacted housing”, and “government field investigation”. The main findings supply a theoretical summary for the Chinese government behaviors in its swift implementation of a housing reconstruction programme and could be useful references for further behaviors that promote successful post-disaster reconstruction.