This article offers an introduction to the China Information’s special issue on disasters and
disaster management. It is argued here that studying disasters and disaster management
should not only improve our understanding of them as social phenomena and thereby
increase our ability to manage disasters better, but also that disasters offer unique
windows for researchers to study Chinese society and explain social and political
changes therein. The article further argues that although research in natural disasters in
China has developed rapidly both in terms of disciplinary approaches and topics, such
research has still to overcome its narrow event-based nature and embrace more crossdisciplinary
and comparative approaches geographically and historically, and disaster
studies should investigate different types of disasters.