“Urban Resilience” has received a great deal of interest recently on a global scale. Urban resilience is frequently utilized to assess the ability of a city to respond to diverse shocks. Urban economic resilience helps understand how quickly a city or region can recover from a global threat. When this thesis project was started, the COVID-19 outbreak was in its third year, and China was still enforcing a “zero-tolerance policy” that mandated a 14-day obligatory quarantine for everyone who had direct or indirect contact with an infected person. Understanding the geography of uneven urban economic resilience, the reasons why, and how some cities can bounce back from unexpected economic downturns while the economic growth of other cities stagnates is essential. This thesis is set in the context of the economic decline in cities that may have been brought on by or is closely related to COVID-19 with a case study in the Hainan province of China. In the empirical analysis, I looked at disposable income, GDP, and the number of tourist arrivals at night to investigate urban economic resilience. Numbers of people receiving minimum living allowance, numbers of residents and numbers of healthcare facilities are used to investigate social resilience. The projected results are that cities located on the south of Hainan Island and near the center of the island have relatively weaker urban economic resilience and social resilience compared to the major cities like Sanya and Haikou, and to enhance urban economic and social resilience, it is essential for cities to undertake necessary modifications to their economic and socio-spatial systems, with an emphasis on offering support to vulnerable groups. The findings of this study may be helpful to scholars and policymakers who need to understand how urban resilience may affect a city’s economic growth and what issues should be watched as a city grows. In conclusion, this research sheds light on urban resilience in the Chinese setting.
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