Short Biography

Xin Li is an associate professor at Nanjing Agricultural University, working in the College of Public Administration. She gained her PhD degree from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on urban regeneration, residential behaviors, and housing and land use policies.

Project

In the face of the rapid spread of the COVID-19 and the associated negative health and socioeconomic influences on the society, governments across the world have enforced strict territorial controls at different geographical scales. However, the similarities of these territorial controls do not necessarily lead to similar outcomes, and apparent differences emerge considering the infectious rate and public responses in different countries. This research tends to uncover why similar territorial governance measures lead to different outcomes about virus transmission control by looking at the relationship between government and the public, i.e., people’s sense of trust towards their government and their willingness to follow governments’ instructions. This will be achieved by revealing the experiences of different migrant groups in urban China, including rural migrants, high-skilled migrants and international migrants, against the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The research will include the following research topics:

1. Against the COVID-19 pandemic, what territorial governance measures are implemented at the neighbourhoods of different migrant groups in urban China?
2. What are the differences and similarities in relation to these territorial controls at neighbourhood level for different migrant groups? What are the driving forces underlying the associated governance differences?
3. How do different migrant groups cope with the enforced territorial controls at neighborhood level?
4. How would the COVID-19 pandemic and associated territorial controls affect different migrants’ settlement intentions in urban China and why?