Introduction: COVID-19 in Asia: Governance and the Politics of the Pandemic

In this introduction to studies of the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in four Asian states—India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and South Korea—we first discuss the difficulties in evaluating the performances of different countries, given the varying reliability of data and the different possible criteria that may be applied. In our studies we aim rather to illuminate the process of different state responses, and we go on to summarize evidence on different patterns of response across Asia, situating the four country studies in a comparative context. We then review arguments in the literature about the determinants of different responses, before presenting our framework for the analysis of the politics that underlie these differences. Political leadership has undoubtedly exercised a powerful influence, but in the structural context of the relationships of state and citizens. We argue that understanding of these relationships is advanced by an analytical framework that draws on state-in-society approaches developed in the work of Joel Migdal, Michael Mann, and Peter Evans.

新冠肺炎在亚洲：治理与疫情的政治

《太平洋事务》特刊导言

关键词：新冠肺炎数据，国家能力，公共服务，卫生体系，封城，检测-追踪-治疗，国家与社会关系，信任。

 本文为四篇分别研究印度、巴基斯坦、越南和韩国等四个亚洲国家应对新冠疫情的政治的论文的导言。我们在文中首先讨论了在评估不同国家表现时，由于数据可靠性的差异和可应用的不同标准而带来的困难。在研究中，我们致力于阐明不同的国家应对疫情的过程，继而概述了亚洲各地不同应对模式的证据，将对四个国家的研究置于比较的语境中。接下来，在提出就这些差异背后的政治进行分析的理论框架之前， 我们评论了现有文献中关于导致不同的疫情应对的决定性因素的论点。政治领导力无疑是发挥了重大的影响，但它发生在国家与公民关系的结构性的背景之下。我们提出，利用从乔∙米格代尔、迈克尔∙曼以及彼得∙伊文思的著作中发展出的“社会中的国家”的分析框架可以极大推进对这些关系的理解。

Translated by Li Guo