During the COVID-19 crisis, what explains the variation in policy adoptionamong Chinese provincial governments? To answer this question, we gathered data on twenty-five COVID-19 containment policies used in China from 31 December 2019 to 18 March 2020. We conducted state-of-the-art multilevel pooled event history analysis to allow us to control for policy heterogeneity. Our results demonstrate that variation in policy adoption during the crisis largely follows politics as usual: policies diffuse from the centre to the provinces in the same way that non-crisis policies diffuse. Our findings highlight the political dynamics of policy adoption and crisis response within China.