Post-pandemic Policy Change and China’s Revision of the Infectious Diseases Law

• In Event: Policy Innovation, Diffusion, Retrenchment and Feedback: Recent Advancement

Abstract

China’s Infectious Diseases Prevention and Control Law plays an important role in addressing epidemic outbreaks. It has
been revised in response to epidemic outbreaks three times. The first revision, in 2004, was in response to the 2002-2003
SARS pandemic, while the second revision in 2014 responded to H7N9 avian influenza infections in 2013. While both these
revisions were drafted and adopted within a short time, the third revision of this law is much slower: the law was included in
the formal legislative agenda in 2020 and although a draft was released in the same year, the revision processes halted until
late 2023, when a new draft law was finally released. To explain this relatively slow response, this paper applies the Multiple
Streams Framework to develop and test hypotheses that help explain the driving forces and obstacles in this post-COVID
lawmaking process. The dataset consists of government statistics, Chinese journal articles, legislative records, news articles,
and policy documents. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the politics of policy change in China and provides
insights into the extent to which China has addressed issues that were exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authors

• Annemieke van den Dool, Duke Kunshan University

• Jialin Li, University of Arizona