¡@¡@In November, 2005, a huge toxic spill more than 70-kilometer long contaminated a river in Harbin, an industrialist city near Russia. The incident grabbed headlines because it was an environmental disaster which threatening the lives of millions of people. The Chinese government was accused of attempting to cover up the incident at first, and its credibility suffered. The catastrophe illustrated the kind of crisis that has happened at regular intervals on the mainland, prompting scholars to believe that similar crises may have happened more often than has been reported.

But is China in a constant state of crisis? The authors of this book preferred to say that the decision-making process in the mainland is under duress rather than to characterize that country as under a constant state of crisis. They agree that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has played an important role in the decision-making process.

In September, 2004, the US Army War College held a conference on the theme of "Chinese Crisis Management" and it emerged that the Chinese government may not consider all incidents to be crises.

For Michael D. Swaine, how China has handled political and military crises in the past provided little foundation for the West to understand Beijing's future approach to crisis management. More questions have been asked than answered as to the ways in which Chinese leaders have handled crises. In the past, Chinese leaders have used political and military crises to build support for the government and for the elite that ran the country. Swaine says that generally that it has been "virtually impossible" to know before and during a crisis what was going on in Beijing.

One of the major cases of crisis management examined is the SARS crisis of 2002-2003. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) killed dozens of people in China as well as in some Asian countries. Susan M. Pushka says that the Chinese domestic health care system spun out of control when SARS struck. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under President Hu Jintao was forced to change strategy and its response to international demands in 2003 after it was accused of denying the existence of SARS and deceiving the international community. Other countries feared that Beijing failed to take immediate action to stop SARS from spreading both domestically and abroad. From November 2002 to February 2003, SARS spread from Guangdong Province to Hong Kong and to other Asian countries. Pushka says, "As SARS spread, official (Chinese) dissemination of inaccurate and incomplete information to an increasingly skeptical international media and officials became less effective." The author says the Chinese leadership at that time was obsessed by the generational shift from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, and was preoccupied by the formation of a new government, about who will move up and who will move out. As in the case of the June 1989 incidents at Tiananmen Square, the CCP used the PLA to suppress the student demonstrations. The CCP was obsessed with self-preservation, even though the threats from the students were minor.

Pushka says Beijing's handling of the Falun Gong reflects the same CCP obsession with preserving its power. She says Beijing became more transparent in mobilizing efforts to fight SARS in 2003, adopting "political pragmatism in the face of increasing international pressure."

Other authors contribute to this book, including Richard Bush who analyzes Chinese decision making under stress in the case of the Taiwan Strait. Bush, who has written extensively on cross-Strait issues and was Washington's envoy to Taipei, says there remains much the US does not know about the way China manages the Taiwan Strait dispute. He says Washington does not have details about the way Chinese leaders behave in a crisis, or information about how those leaders operate to resolve a crisis. He says Beijing always fears that Taiwanese leaders will move to separate permanently from China. "In situations that qualify as crises, China's decision-making system is prone to become even more centralized and personalized than it normally is, and to overreact to perceived Taiwan provocations," Bush says.

The US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the collision between a Chinese jet fighter and an American reconnaissance plane in April 2001 are discussed by Paul H.B. Godwin in an effort to understand Beijing's decision-making system.