Security Governance in East Asia and China’s Response to COVID-19

A non-state centric approach challenged the concept of security governance in response to a changed security environment, bringing fragmentation of authority and heterarchical structures into the framework. The existing studies on this approach are largely contextualized from the European experience and developments in its security architecture. This leads to the questions as to whether and how non-state centric security governance occurs in other regions. This article contributes to the literature by studying security governance in East Asia, where the state is a dominant feature in security governance, and through the lens of non-traditional security, with China’s COVID-19 response as a case study. In this particular case, we find that security governance that opens spaces for greater involvement of actors beyond the state could happen, albeit in a more circumscribed manner and subject of certain conditions. We identify three conditions that catalyze the opening of governance spaces: when the capacity of the state is stretched to the limits, when the legitimacy of the government is under pressure, and when there is trust between the government and other actors.