Crisis, Disaster and Risk

Book excerpt: This book explores the interactions of theories of risk with natural disasters, health crises, and crises in the areas of science and technology. Using organizational frameworks developed exclusively by the author, it provides a series of best practices and lessons related to each of the emergency and crisis situations covered. These lessons will assist students and practitioners, engaged in learning about and reacting to crises, to better respond to them. The mass protests that erupted in China during the spring of 1989 were not confined to Beijing and Shanghai. Cities and towns across the great breadth of China were engulfed by demonstrations, which differed regionally in content and tone: the complaints and protest actions in prosperous Fuijan Province on the south China coast were somewhat different from those in Manchuria or inland Xi'an or the country towns of Hunan. The variety of the reactions is a barometer of the political and economic climate in contemporary China. In this book, Western China specialists who were on the spot that spring describe and analyze the upsurges of protest that erupted around them.