The COVID-19 pandemic has immensely affected economic and social order in not only China but the entire world, seriously threatening peoples’ lives and property. In China’s fight against COVID-19, the community is at the front line of joint prevention and control of the disease, yet it faces the problem of insufficient resilience. We explored the manifestations and formation mechanism of the problem of insufficient resilience in community public health crisis governance, based on the complex adaptive system theory, which emphasizes interaction among subjects and between subjects and the environment to improve the adaptability to the environment. Questionnaires and in-depth interviews were conducted in 28 counties (districts) of 14 cities of 7 provinces in China; 2345 questionnaires and 71 interview data were collected, and we conducted descriptive statistical analysis on questionnaire data. It is found that some communities faced insufficient resilience problems such as “simply isolating households and communities”, “blindly setting limits”, “layer-by-layer law”, and “rejecting and repelling all individuals from or even related to Hubei”. These problems are due to the fact that the community have a non-interactive relationship, which is a one-dimensional linear governance model to some extent. The legal content of the building of a “comprehensive disaster-reduction demonstration community” implemented by the Chinese government is compelled to stay at the level of system design to some extent, with its existence playing an ornamental role but lacking a substantial one. In this regard, this study suggests that a resilient governance model of community pluralistic cooperation be established based on the theoretical framework of complex adaptive system. This model is designed to increase the resilience of community public health crisis governance. The authoritative role of central and local policies is expected to be truly developed and played in dealing with the grassroots community public health crisis.

Rural health governance is an important part of low-carbon green life, which is also related to the sustainable development and population health project in rural areas. Based on the survey data of 2343 rural residents in China, this study adopted a binary logistic regression model to explore the effects of rural residents’ social network and cognition on their participation in rural health governance. The research results show that only less than 30% of the respondents participated in rural health governance, and the proportion of rural resident participating is not high. Both their social network and cognition have a significant impact on their participation in rural health governance. Introverted communication helps strengthen the connection between rural residents, form the network and structure of rural social communication, build emotional links and common interests, and form a common cultural understanding paradigm and action framework. The extraverted communication means that rural residents gradually break away from the social network of acquaintances, which is not conducive to building a rural community. Rural residents’ understanding of behavior begins to deviate from rural culture, customs and emotional values, and the binding force of traditional culture is reduced, making it difficult to motivate them to participate in rural public life. Policy cognition can improve rural residents’ recognition of the value and significance of health governance. Responsibility awareness is the internal driving force for rural residents to participate in health governance, which can also reduce the governance cost of rural managers. Based on this, increasing rural residents’ introverted communication and cultivating their sense of responsibility are key to promoting their participation in rural health governance.