Family separation in rural China has led to a considerably large number of left-behind women who have to deal with livelihood fragility. The Department for International Development (DFID) framework focusing on households provides a base to understand the livelihood fragility of these women. Based on this framework and the existing field research, this study identifies that the national macro-strategy of unsynchronized development of industrialization, informatization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization leads to a separated migration model for rural families. Furthermore, the process of social modernization increases the fragility risk of how the left-behind family functions. The traditional gender culture expectations also directly affect rural families to make the livelihood strategy choice of, “male working outside, female taking care of home”. Based on the above theoretical research, this study extracts the concept of “ritualized law” to shed light on gender differentiation and family separation. A number of formal social security institutions have been established to promote the development of farmers, however, the ingrained culture gender differentiation encourages men to work in the profitable urban industry while women work in the field of unpaid agriculture and shoulder the responsibility of housework. This makes the formal institution a symbolic ornament for left-behind women, while they are forced to stay in rural areas and suffer from the fragility of livelihood.

Public health emergency plans reflect the strong determination of the Chinese government to prevent, control, and eliminate the hazards of public health emergencies. In order to explore whether the public health emergency plan in rural communities can be effectively implemented and play its due functions, based on Smith’s policy implementation process theory, we have conducted a field study in 44 townships from 22 provinces across China. We find that rural communities, as the main battlefields for pandemic prevention and control, face the problem of ritualization of public health emergency plans, resulting in a state of ‘substantial system ritualization’. From the realistic scene back to the theoretical discussion, this study theoretically classifies ritualization into functional-failure ritualization, functional-delay ritualization, functional-vacancy ritualization, and functional-devaluation ritualization. Regardless of the type of ritualization, the direct cause is that institutional rules don’t play their authoritative role in solving practical problems, and the key to solving such problems is the ‘law-based governance’. This study aims to explore the generation mechanism of the ritualization of public health emergency plans in rural communities, and at the same time summarize and extract some insightful new viewpoints and new knowledge.