China and State Capacity in the Era of Covid-19

By Flora Sapio, July 2020 F or decades, the Asian continent has seen the import of concepts devised in Europe or in the United States, and it has been on the receiving end of efforts aimed at enhancing the capacity of national states. The People’s Republic of China has been no exception to this trend. The notion of guojia nengli (state capacity) has slowly entered the ecosystem of concepts and ideas used in public administration and across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines. The People’s Republic of China’s ability to formulate and achieve its goals in domestic and foreign policy has been steadily increasing. [1] Until very recently, the country has been analyzed first and foremost in its role as a recipient state , and thus analyses have tended to focus on the domestic aspects of state capacity. [2] In a very short time-span, however, together with the United States and the European Union, China has become one of the main actors in global development, and thus an exporter of state capacity initiatives. [3] The notion of state capacity is, however, a notoriously slippery one, and not just because it spans the realms of different academic disciplines. As a concept created to assess a state’s ability to rule itself and its population, it possesses an obvious political-philosophical dimension, one that is in a direct relation to the legitimacy of the elites in power. As a core concept in political science, the meaning of state capacity is open to debate and contestation. As a bundle of interlocking governance processes, state capacity is measurable, and yet notoriously difficult to assess empirically, regardless of the conceptualization or the indicators that are chosen. Not least, the capacity of a state isn’t built in a day. It depends on historical, economic, political and social factors, none of which can be fine-tuned or adjusted at will to meet unforeseen crises and risk. All of this considered, does it still make any sense to ask whether the Covid-19 pandem