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

Abstract

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