Urban accidents and safety governance in China (2015–2024): evolution, achievements, and future pathways

Urban safety governance is critical for China’s sustainable urbanization. This study evaluates the evolution of urban safety governance in China (2015–2024) through a five-dimensional analytical framework—resilience, risk governance, collaborative governance, spatial justice, and system modeling. Using national annual time-series data on officially reported accident outcomes (2015–2024), together with national policy documents, we employed segmented time-series regression with Prais–Winsten estimation to estimate trend changes associated with the documented structural break in the national annual series. The results reveal a documented structural break in 2016 followed by a sustained decline in accident fatalities, with an average annual reduction of ~9.5% ( \(β ≈ -0.099\) , \(p < 0.001\) ) in the post-reform period. Although top-down mobilization has been associated with improved control of recurrent operational risks, the qualitative assessment based on policy-document coding, structured document synthesis, and framework-based interpretation identifies persistent structural constraints, including administrative segmentation, digital fragmentation, and grassroots resource asymmetry. A heuristic qualitative comparison with Anglo-American, Continental European, and Japanese governance models further highlights the adaptation barriers that China faces in moving toward legal institutionalization and more autonomous forms of social resilience. This study advances the literature by providing triangulated empirical evidence of China’s governance transformation and offering pathways to shift from campaign-style rectification to a system-coordinated, legally embedded resilience model.