Strategic muddling and the quiet hollowing of China’s zero-COVID governance

This study revisits the concept of ‘muddling through’ in the context of authoritarian crisis governance. Building on the work of Lindblom and Zhou Xueguang and using China’s zero-COVID campaign as a case study, we propose a new crisis-induced variant of muddling through that is characterized by a set of strategic coping behaviours induced by intense political pressure. We call this ‘strategic muddling’. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews with local officials, we identify three mutually reinforcing and embedded forms of local adaptation: symbolic compliance through data manipulation, informal coalition-making, and guanxi-based cautious probing. Although these practices sustained symbolic order in the short term, they ultimately distorted feedback mechanisms, weakened enforcement capacity, and undermined the mobilizational structure of China’s pandemic response. By highlighting a subtle yet highly consequential internal mechanism of institutional hollowing within local crisis governance, this study offers illuminating insights into authoritarian resilience, performative governance, and crisis governance.