Emotion governance and practice resilience in the reflexive modernity: How community social workers in a low-risk Chinese city work with people from Wuhan

China’s stringent rules have made a remarkable achievement in COVID-19 pandemic control. Beyond the stringency and thorough measures, emotion governance and resilience play noteworthy roles in crisis response and management at community level. The essay adopts a narrative approach through my personal experiences, observations, family members’ storytelling and conversations with social workers. It draws on the lessons of China’s community governance during the outbreak of COVID-19 to understand how social work practices nudge people towards positive emotion and facilitate implementing state’s pandemic control policy in a community that consists of local residents and people from high-risk areas. It explores the bonding between emotion governance and resilient practice in communal pandemic control through interacting and constituting between state and society in the reflexive modernity.