“One in Trouble, All to Help”: The Paired Assistance Program to Disaster-Affected Areas in China

Abstract

Paired Assistance to Disaster-Affected Areas (PADAA) is a mutual disaster aid and recovery program with Chinese characteristics, which has shown its efficiency after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in restoring and reconstructing the expansive disaster-impacted regions. This chapter aims to describe how PADAA works in China. The chapter provides an overview of the history of PADAA, and depicts the process by which PADAA incrementally developed from local experiments to a national policy and finally became a planned and institutionalized political mobilization in the Chinese emergency management system after several decades. We adopt the concept “campaign-style governance” to explain how PADAA works in the Chinese administrative system. China’s central government was able to require provincial and local governments from more economically developed areas to provide necessary assistance to devastated areas for post-disaster restoration and reconstruction. This was effective because of the Chinese system’s stringent vertical controls and the practices of local accountability that gave provincial and local officials from donor provinces strong incentives to perform effectively in reconstruction work. We use the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake as a case to demonstrate how PADAA works in reality, and discuss the challenges of PADAA in its implementation process.