Abstract: Since the reform and opening up policy, China’s public health governance system has been distinctly emergency oriented and featured, therefore, it is feasible to explore the reform process of China’s public health governance system and generalize the laws behind the process in accordance with the policy changes of public health emergency. Taking 460 emergency policies of public health issued by the central government from 1978 to 2020 as samples, this paper makes a systematic study on the external attributes and internal structure of policy changes from five aspects: policy time, policy types, policy subjects, policy problems and policy tools by using the quantitative analysis of policy documents. The results show that the reform of public health governance system in China followed a trend of emergency evolution, indicating the coexistence of overall increase and fluctuations at different stages in terms of policy quantity, the alternation of authority and diversification in terms of policy subjects, the symbiosis of abruptness and continuity in terms of policy themes and the integration of tool combinations and dominance in terms of policy tools. Based on this, this paper puts forward countermeasures and suggestions to optimize China’s public health governance system from the perspective of policy: coordinating policy subjects to enhance the ability of crisis response, strengthening policy tools to improve the efficiency of emergency response and optimizing the policy agenda to achieve smart emergency management.

Key words: emergency policy, emergency management, public health, public health emergencies, policy changes, quantitative analysis of policy documents