Abstract
The conventional wisdom of disaster studies focused on the state and civil society as the outside helper in the reconstruction stage. The two aspects, however, largely neglected the subjective responses of victims and local communities. In the name of resilience, recent studies have turned to the effects of local community in disaster relief. According to our fieldwork after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, we develop four ideal-type of communities—(1) strong state vs. strong community, (2) weak state vs. strong community, (3) strong state vs. weak community, and (4) weak state vs. weak community—and find that the performances of reconstruction, from the best to the worst, follow the same sequence. It displays the important role of local community in building resilience. In contrast, the strong state top-down reconstruction project may damage the performances by destroy social networks in local communities.