Wei Fan, Liu Yi Chen, Li Si Yi
The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasizes the construction of a national security system and improves the capacity for disaster prevention, mitigation and relief for major natural disasters, which places higher requirements on mega-city emergency resilience governance. On July 20, 2021, Zhengzhou suffered an unprecedented extraordinary heavy-rain event. The hourly rainfall in Zhengzhou urban area once reached 201.9 millimeters, breaking the historical meteorological record. Extreme precipitation triggered urban waterlogging, mountain floods, subway flooding and cascading secondary disasters, causing heavy casualties and huge direct economic losses. The disaster exposed prominent practical dilemmas in mega-city emergency resilience construction, including insufficient coupling of digital early-warning and response mechanisms, poor cross-departmental collaborative efficiency, prominent vulnerability of urban-rural and key infrastructure, and deviation of risk governance concepts, and has become a typical research sample for exploring the modernization of emergency governance in large-scale inland cities. Taking Zhengzhou's "7·20" extraordinary heavy-rain disaster as the core case, this study constructs a mixed research framework of "thick case description—embedded comparative analysis—mechanism extraction". In the case dimension, the process-tracing method is adopted to restore the full-cycle logical chain of disaster evolution, government decision-making and on-site disposal, sort out key time nodes and response defects in risk warning, emergency activation, on-site rescue and post-disaster recovery. Meanwhile, this paper adopts the embedded comparison method to select three central-region mega-cities including Zhengzhou, Wuhan and Xi'an to compare the institutional arrangement, resource reserve and practical effect of flood-prevention emergency response, and summarize common risks and individual governance deficiencies in central-China urban emergency governance. Furthermore, social-network analysis is used to identify the structural characteristics of inter-department emergency collaboration network; fsQCA is applied to excavate multiple concurrent causal configurations affecting emergency resilience performance; LDA topic modeling is utilized to mine the theme evolution of urban flood-control policy texts, forming multi-method complementary empirical evidence support. This paper systematically summarizes four core dilemmas restricting the emergency resilience of mega-cities: At the digital governance level, there exist information silos and disconnection between early-warning release and practical response; at the multi-subject coordination level, responsibility boundaries of government-market-society are ambiguous and social force participation lacks institutional guarantee; at the infrastructure resilience level, there are structural deficiencies in lifeline projects and unbalanced risk vulnerability between central urban areas and suburban mountainous regions; at the institutional operation level, the problem of institutional fragmentation remains and the governance logic of "emphasizing rescue while neglecting pre-warning and prevention" has not been fundamentally reversed. On this basis, this paper inherits and expands the "Concept-System-Capacity" three-dimensional interactive analysis model, and interprets the internal generation logic of mega-city emergency resilience: renewal of risk governance concept serves as the internal driving force, promoting governance transformation from passive post-event disposal to whole-process proactive risk prevention; institutional reconstruction provides carrier guarantee, breaking fragmented governance patterns via responsibility re-division, process re-engineering and normative system integration; comprehensive capacity upgrading is the external embodiment of governance effectiveness, covering risk monitoring, emergency scheduling, grassroots disposal and post-disaster reconstruction. The three dimensions jointly form a dynamic closed-loop of "concept guides institutional optimization, system supports capacity improvement, capacity practice feeds back concept renewal". Accordingly, this paper puts forward targeted optimization paths from four dimensions: In the dimension of digital empowerment, build a whole-chain intelligent early-warning-response linkage platform to break data barriers and realize scenario-oriented risk deduction; in the dimension of multi-subject co-governance, perfect normalized institutionalized collaboration mechanisms for government- enterprise-social forces to stimulate the endogenous participation motivation of social emergency resources; in the dimension of infrastructure resilience renewal, make up the shortboard of lifeline projects and strengthen community grassroots emergency capacity to mitigate spatial vulnerability differences; in the dimension of holistic governance, improve cross-departmental and cross-regional collaborative systems, reverse the path dependence of "valuing rescue over prevention". In addition, this paper attempts to construct an emergency resilience maturity assessment framework oriented to mega-city characteristics, which can provide operable theoretical reference and decision-making basis for risk diagnosis and continuous governance improvement of large and medium-sized cities in inland China.
Mega-city Emergency Resilience; Multi-subject Co-governance; Zhengzhou "7·20" Heavy-Rain Disaster; Process Tracing; Three-Dimensional Interactive Model