The Formation and Transformation of China’s Abnormal System

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the concept of a holistic approach to national security become the guiding principle of national system construction and governance practice. Under this background, the formation and development of China’s abnormal system also become an important innovation for China to prevent significant risks. “Combination of ordinary and military application” (平战结合) and “reserves of specialized and regular staff ” (专常兼备) are regarded as valuable institutional resources for the country to conduct abnormal governance, but few studies explain these systems. Based on the case of emergency management and public health emergency management, this paper find that most of the institutional practices for major risks in China originate from temporary event response, and follow the change context of event emergency, organization nesting and system embedding. This process includes three mechanisms: First, flexible linkage mechanism. The country will translate the ambiguity related to new risks and the measures taken to control risks into operations and strategies; Secondly, risk translation mechanism, the state organizes various risks to reallocate responsibilities; Finally, system embedding mechanism, which embeds the risk related subjects and the normalized allocation responsibilities of resources into the conventional organizational operation system. The abnormal system with the above mechanism as the core contains the path of theoretical innovation with Chinese characteristics, which goes beyond the western theoretical paradigm of “risk event response - administrative system response - personal risk transformation”.