The end of an era

I remember the exact moment when I realised it was over. It was the 6th of December 2022. After four days stuck at home due to a flu (which I now think may well have been Covid), I left my flat and walked to the shopping mall near my home in Beijing's Chaoyang district. I wanted to get some fresh air, and also buy some supplies at the mall's supermarket. 

When I entered the mall I had to scan a QR code with my Beijing Health Kit app, just like every other time for the past three years. My last PCR test had been taken 5 days ago, as my app clearly displayed, and I was by no means certain they would let me in. In fact, I pretty much expected to be turned away. The last time I had been out of my home, public places all required a negative result from a test taken within the last 48 hours.

To my surprise, the security guard happily waved me through. Once I got in, I saw that there were customers sitting down in some of the restaurants. The last time I had been out, restaurants were only doing deliveries and dining in was forbidden. I had heard that some places had started reopening in outlying districts of Beijing, but I barely believed it, and I thought that in my area everything was still closed. 

According to the official statistics (which, as I now know, were already becoming unreliable), there had been thousands of Covid cases in Beijing over the previous day, of which hundreds had been found "in society" (among people not subjected to any form of preventive quarantine). 

The fact itself that restaurants might reopen wasn't strange. They have been open for most of the past three years, after all. But the idea that the government might allow them to open up again while the city was clearly in the midsts of an uncontrolled Covid outbreak would have seemed outlandish just a few days earlier. 

At that moment, I knew that the Chinese government's attitude towards Covid had changed, drastically and probably for good. When you live in China you develop a feel for what way the political wind is blowing (and Covid-control policies are inherently political). Official government announcements are opaque and ambiguous, but you learn to read the room. Beijing, as the capital, is always particularly well protected, and if they were ready to let Covid spread in Beijing, this meant they were determined to transition towards "living with Covid" all over China.

So that was it. The three year-long gargantuan effort to prevent an infectious aerial-born disease from spreading in China was being abandoned. All of the measures that had defined the rhythm of our lives over the past three years, and especially the past year (mass PCR tests, sudden lockdowns, closed borders), were all going to be consigned to the dustbin in no time. Also, we were all going to get Covid. 

The next day, China's national health authority officially announced that people with Covid would be allowed to quarantine at home, something that would have been unthinkable just a week earlier. Following that, public places stopped asking people to scan QR codes with their tracing apps, and it became possible to travel anywhere in China without taking a PCR test or getting quarantined. Then they retired the 行程吗, the app that shows all the cities and counties where you've been over the last 7 days. In a matter of days, China felt like a different country.

An empty shopping mall in Beijing, December 14

I had been saying China should open up since at least March this year, when Omicron started to spread and Shanghai and other cities were put under brutal lockdowns. And yet when it happened it felt disconcerting. Deep down I had never really believed the Chinese government was going to give up on containing Covid. I don't think most Chinese did either. 

And then, from one day to the next, it happened. Official government WeChat accounts, which for years had been keeping people updated on the latest quarantine policies and lockdowns, were suddenly publishing articles with titles like "what to do if you are at home with Covid" and "how long after getting Covid is it ok to go back to work".

Somewhat naively, I had imagined that if Zero Covid ended everyone would be rushing to travel, go out and have fun. The reality has of course been somewhat different. The moment China abandoned its total elimination approach, Covid spread like wildfire throughout the country. In Beijing it happened particularly fast, since the virus was already spreading significantly before they lifted all the restrictions (in fact, as I mentioned earlier, I may have caught it just before the containment measures ended). 

The Covid pandemic didn't stop being a source of worry, but the things people had to worry about changed suddenly. Instead of worrying about waking up and finding your building had been locked down, or getting a phone call telling you that you had been in the same place as someone positive and had to be taken to a quarantine centre, suddenly everyone was worrying about where to get hold of home testing kits, ibuprofen and cough medicine, or how to protect elderly relatives from infection. 

The first time I heard of a friend getting Covid in Beijing was on the 5th of December. He had tested positive with a home antigen test. At the time people still assumed they might get sent to a quarantine camp, so he decided to stay home and not tell anyone. By the 10th of December, only five days later, it felt like half the city had been infected, and people were openly sharing news of their infections on social media.

Over the following week or two, most of my friends came down with the virus. Restaurants that had just opened up had to close again because all of their staff was sick. I know Omicron spreads quickly, but the speed of the contagion still shocked me. We've probably never seen the virus encounter such an immunologically naive population before, since just a month ago almost no one in China had contracted Covid.

Within days of the restrictions ending, the streets of Beijing became emptier than they had been during the peak of the lockdowns. Everyone was either infected, or afraid of becoming infected. The few people you saw were wearing an N95 mask, rather than the blue surgical masks that used to be the norm. Government messaging may have changed all of a sudden, but you don't go telling people that Covid is the plague for three years, and then turn around and tell them it's no worse than a flu and expect them to lose their fear.

Crowds in central Beijing on Christmas Eve

It's now been about three weeks since China opened up, and in Beijing people are starting to go out again. Restaurants and gyms are filling up. Most people have either had Covid, or are fed up with being careful. The public will only be cautious for so long, as much of the world found out in 2020. On Christmas Eve there were large crowds in Sanlitun's shopping and bar district, although almost everyone was still wearing a mask.

Of course things may be back to normal on the streets, but they aren't in the hospitals. Official statistics on the number of Covid deaths are so low as to be meaningless, but there is no question that people are dying and that hospitals in Beijing are overwhelmed by all the serious cases. And one can only imagine what it's like in the poorer parts of China. 

Essentially China is now going through what most other countries experienced in 2020, except with a milder but more contagious Covid variant and with vaccines (although quite a few Chinese aren't vaccinated, in what can only be described as a serious policy failure). The young and healthy are learning to live with the risk of Covid, while the elderly and frail continue being careful or risk ending up in hospital. Soon it will come to seem normal here too. 

"We only take guests from the Mainland"

The Covid pandemic (or rather, the government response to the pandemic) has changed life in China in all sorts of ways, and travelling within the country has become far more difficult. One thing on which not many have commented, probably because it only affects the few foreigners still left here, is how hard it has become to find hotels that will accept foreign guests.

To be clear, it has long been the case that not all hotels in China accept foreigners. This did not start with the pandemic. In fact, it has probably been true since Maoist times. In his classic memoir River Town, Peter Hessler recounts being rejected by hotels in Western China for being a foreigner back in the late nineties. 

Personally, I have experienced hotels turn me away for as long as I've been in China. For instance, in 2013 I once travelled to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, 300 kms south of Beijing. Before going I booked a room in a 如家酒店 (Home Inn), a chain of hotels with branches all over the country. I arrived at 11 pm, only for a smiling young clerk to tell me apologetically that unfortunately they could not accept foreign guests. Never mind that when I called the chain's national service line to book, I had specified that I was a foreign citizen. After making some phone calls, a (more expensive) hotel that could take foreigners was located nearby, and a taxi was called to take me there (at my own expense of course). 

This sort of annoyance isn't limited to remote parts of the country. It happens in cities like Beijing and Shanghai as well. On one occasion in 2017 I booked a room in a cheap hotel in Shanghai, only to arrive late at night and be told that they were unable to take foreigners. I had booked with an app on my phone, and it did specify somewhere amongst the reams of writing (in Chinese) that the hotel does not accept foreign guests, but I hadn't even thought to check. Luckily another chain hotel down the road was able to take me. 

In my experience, finding Chinese hotels that welcomed foreigners had been getting harder for years even before the Covid pandemic struck. I don't think the regulations changed; quite simply, enforcement got stricter. In the past, some hotels were happy enough to bend the rules. If a foreigner travelled alongside locals, they would simply register the Chinese guests with their ID and ignore the foreigner. If they travelled alone, the hotel might let them stay without registering them and take their cash. 

After the change in China's leadership in 2012, laws and regulations started to be enforced more strictly in all fields of life, including this one, and finding hotels that would acquiesce to foreigners staying illegally became harder. In 2019, I once spent hours wondering around the centre of Kunming late at night, trying to find a hotel that would take me in. Place after place rejected me, saying they could not accept foreign citizens. In desperation I looked in an app and found a 5-star hotel in the suburbs that purported to take foreigners. After calling to make sure, I took a taxi there and checked in. I ended up spending far more money than I had intended. 

It is true that the hotels that reject foreigners tend to be the cheaper ones. But it is not true, as people sometimes claim, that foreigners are only prevented from staying in grotty places that are unhygienic or unsafe, and that these rules are there to "protect" foreigners or to make sure they come away with a good impression of China. During my time in China I have been rejected by numerous hotels that were perfectly decent, and accepted by others that were horrible.

Unlike many believe, it does not in fact appear to be true that hotels in China need a special permit to accept foreigners. At least, there is no national regulation that states this. There used to be, but it was abolished in 2003. Quite simply, article 39 of the Foreigners Entry and Exit Management Law states that hotels must register foreign guests according to "applied regulations" and report the registration to the local police authority. 

Foreign citizens in China are supposed to register with the police within 24 hours of arriving in a locality. If you are staying in a hotel, they are responsible for registering you. While the hotels should be able to register foreigners automatically in their computer system, some of them may have to go to the police station to do this in person because their system does not accept foreign passport numbers (or it does, but they are unaware of how to use it).

It's always hard to get to the bottom of these things, but it seems that many of the hotels that refuse foreigners would be legally able to accept them, but want to avoid the hassle (or perhaps the scrutiny) that comes with registering them. It is also entirely possible that local authorities in various parts of China formally or informally prohibit or discourage hotels from taking foreigners, especially ones that are cheaper or not part of an international chain. Apart from anything else, this ensures the foreign guests spend more money.

Much probably depends on the attitude of local authorities and the police, which may explain the seemingly random way in which hotels in some areas are much more relaxed about having foreign guests than in other areas. When I travelled in western Hunan in 2018 pretty much every hotel seemed to accept foreigners, even in quite remote places, while in a relatively cosmopolitan city like Kunming finding a place to stay was a struggle. 

It is even possible to argue that the widespread practice of hotels rejecting foreign guests is actually illegal under China's Consumer Protection Law. Some claim that if you call the hotel and threaten legal action, they will take you in. I've never tried this, but I find it unlikely it would work in all cases, especially when local authorities have exerted pressure in the other direction. In any case, this is hardly how you want to spend your time when you travel. 

It must also be added that it is not only foreign citizens who get rejected in Chinese hotels. Certain Chinese minorities, particularly the ones native to the two regions that the government considers "restive", are also regularly (and shockingly) refused accommodation. The motivation is quite possibly the same: too much hassle from the police and local authorities, which puts hotels off from accepting them. 

Essentially, the issue appears to be that if you belong to a group seen as a potential national security issue, or more recently a public health threat in the case of foreigners, your movements need to be monitored and controlled. This makes you a source of hassle and potential trouble. It may be nothing personal, but hotels don't want you (or have been told not to take you). Perhaps uniquely in the world, hotels rejecting guests has become one of the most overt forms of discrimination in China. 

The booking page for a hotel in Sanya on a phone app. The encircled line says "we only accept guests from Mainland China".

Since the pandemic hit, finding hotels that will let foreigners stay has become much, much harder than it used to be, probably due to the general paranoia about us bringing Covid in from the virus-infested outside world. It used to be pretty much guaranteed that, no matter where you went in China, you would still find plenty of hotels that would accept foreigners too. This is no longer true today. 

In vast swathes of China, especially in the North and West, upwards of 90% of hotels no longer give rooms to "international friends" at all. The few that do are often the most high-end ones (4 stars and above), making travel within the country much more expensive and inconvenient. 

When I travel in China, I usually book hotels through the Tongcheng Travel (同程旅行) mini-program which I access through WeChat. I have learnt to always read carefully through the hotel's "policies" to see if I can spot the little phrase 仅接待大陆客人 (we only take guests from Mainland China), which appears depressingly often. In some instances they will say 仅接待大陆及港澳台客人 (we only take guests from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), which is slightly more generous but still of no use to me (also take a second to reflect on how crazy it is that, 25 years after the handover, plenty of hotels in the Mainland won't even take Hong Kongers). Some of the places that carry this warning may turn out to take foreigners anyway, and some that don't still won't take you. It's all quite unpredictable.

It must be said that the situation still varies by the province. Last year I found it much easier to find accommodation in Hainan and Guangdong, both provinces that tend to be much more open to the outside world. A couple of hotels in Hainan did cancel my booking once they realised I was a foreigner, one of them a fancy resort in Sanya, but the second place I tried was always happy to take me.

Once you get away from touristy areas in the South, however, finding accommodation as a foreigner has become a struggle. Even in the outskirts of Beijing only 4/5-star hotels seem to accept foreign citizens at the moment, at prices that start from 6-700 Yuan a night. It used to be possible for foreigners to stay in 农家院 (rural homestays) in the mountains around Beijing with no questions asked. But on a recent trip of mine to such an area the local homestays (which double as restaurants) were wary of even letting me eat there, because they'd been told to report any foreigners they received.

If you travel somewhere and the handful of places that take foreigners are fully booked, then you're out of luck. Last year when I travelled to Yushu, I found that out of the dozens of hotels in the prefectural capital only three accepted foreigners. All three hotels were already sold out for the dates of an annual horse-riding fair, when people pour in from the rest of the county. I was going back to Beijing around that time anyway, but I ended up leaving a day early because of this. 

The fact that more and more hotels around China won't let foreigners stay is an unwelcome development but not a surprising one, at least for me. It's part of a general trend towards closing off which started well before the pandemic, but has been heavily intensified because of it. There is much speculation about when China will give up on its policy of  "dynamic clearance" of Covid and move towards some sort of coexistence with the virus. I have no idea when this might happen, but when and if the policy is abandoned it may take years before some of its unfortunate side-effects are rolled back, including this one. 

Even if one day China's borders open up again, I think foreign travellers who come here are going to find a country vastly less easy to travel in than the one they remember.

Antisemitism with Chinese characteristics

Many bad ideas have made their way from the West to China since the two civilisations collided in the 19th century, but until recently antisemitism wasn't one of them. 

Unfortunately, it looks like this may be changing. The number of Chinese academics and media personalities recently espousing antisemitic rhetoric has become impossible to ignore. The latest example is professor Zhang Wenmu, from the prestigious Center for Strategic Studies of Beihang University, Beijing. He is a well-known political scientist and naval strategist, and also a "leftist" in the Chinese sense, in other words a conservative nationalist and statist.

In a weird bit of online commentary, translated by the excellent Israeli analyst Tuvia Gering, Prof. Zhang offered this astonishing take on events in Ukraine: "Why has Ukraine become Judaised, and why has Israel put up with it? It's because Wall Street wanted to plant a quasi-Israel in this problematic European region. Israel, like the US and UK, is a tool of Wall Street or, to put it another way, a moneymaking subsidiary of a corporation masquerading as a state. So what is the reason for Ukraine's Nazification? It was designed to sow the seeds of a world war in Europe. In the previous one, the Jews did not anticipate Hitler, whom they had helped to power, to turn on them. However Jews as people, as well as the great bulk of humanity, are merely tools for Wall Street's profits."

Zhang Wenmu is clearly no stranger to antisemitism: in August last year he wrote a rambling article which mixed conspiracies about George Soros, Covid-19 as an American biological weapon, and the Jews as a "people of usurers" who dominate the US. He even managed to throw in a few quotes from Marx's tract "on the Jewish Question", which many consider highly antisemitic.

If this sort of rhetoric were limited to Professor Zhang alone, it could be ignored as the work of a lone crank. Unfortunately, it is not. Examples abound. What is most concerning is that some of China's infamous nationalist influencers have decided to jump on the antisemitic bandwagon. The most striking example is Lu Kewen, a former factory worker whose rants have over the last few years amassed millions of followers across various Chinese social media platforms. 

In May last year, Lu Kewen published an article on his WeChat account entitled "What should we make of the Jews?". The "we" in question is of course the Chinese nation. The article is pretty much a rehashing of all the world's worst antisemitic conspiracy theories, but it also claims the Jews are "enemies of China". Predictably the Jews are charged with controlling the US and its "anti-China media", but they are also held responsible for the Opium Wars, with Kewen peddling the idea that most of the opium was actually sold by Jewish merchants. It is hard to imagine a more inflammatory charge in China, and misinformation like this could do real damage if it spreads. The article, which ends with an exhortation to guard against "Jewish infiltration" of Chinese media and finance, got dozens of thousands of likes, and at least a hundred thousand clicks, possibly far more (WeChat does not allow you to see figures over a hundred thousand).

Chinese vice-premier Wang Qishan on a visit to the Wailing Wall

Until very recently, this kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric was virtually unheard of in China. What seems to have marked a turning point is the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, which took place in May last year. During previous rounds of fighting in the Middle East, Chinese diplomats and spokespeople stuck to bland and neutral-sounding statements, deploring the violence and urging restraint on both sides. This is hardly surprising when you consider that the Chinese leadership walks a fine line in the region, trying to remain friends with everyone, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, from Israel to Qatar, usually with remarkable success. In fact Israel and China enjoy blooming commercial ties, much to the annoyance of several US administrations.

Last year, however, China's "wolf-warrior" diplomats took Israel's bombing of Gaza as another opportunity to publicly blast the US. The main public faces of Chinese diplomacy turned to Twitter, now the world's primary arena for this sort of "undiplomatic" diplomacy, with Hua Chunying tweeting about how America "turns a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinians" even though it "claims to care" about the "human rights of Muslims", while Zhao Lijian tweeted a picture of an American eagle dropping a bomb on Gaza.

This shift in tone seems to have little to do with Israel or the Palestinians themselves, and everything to do with a wish to get back at the US for daring to complain about China's treatment of its Muslim citizens in Xinjiang, with American criticism now painted as hypocrisy. Attacking the US for its one-sided support of Israel is an easy card to play, and will win you a lot of sympathy in much of the world. The temptation must have been too much to resist for the champions of China's new assertive diplomacy, in spite of the risk of throwing relations with Israel under a bus.

China's English-language state-media duly followed suit, with the Global Times publishing one of its infamous editorials on how the US held "undeniable responsibility" for the Israel-Hamas conflict. The rhetoric was mainly directed at America, rather than Israel, but at one point the editorial quotes a Chinese analyst as saying that US policy in the Middle East has "long been kidnapped by its Jewish community that serves the interests of Israel".

CGTN, China's main outward-facing propaganda channel, then published a short video entitled "Why does the US act as a diplomatic shield for Israel?" During the video, the presenter says "some believe that US pro-Israel policy is traceable to the influence of wealthy Jews and the Jewish lobby". He goes on to explain, in a pedagogical fashion, that there are, indeed, many rich Jews in the US, and that "Jews dominate finance, media and internet sectors". He adds "So do they have powerful lobbies like some say? Possible." But he then explains that the real reason for US support of Israel is not the power of American Jewry, but rather the fact that Israel serves the US's geopolitical interests as its main "beachhead" in the Middle East.

In spite of this conclusion, the video presents American Jews' control of the economy as a fact. It is likely that the people who made it simply did not realise how inflammatory it can be to talk about Jews "dominating finance". After the Israeli embassy in Beijing issued a strong complaint, the video was removed from CGTN's website.

The antisemitic tone of this sort of commentary may be unintentional, but it probably helped deliver the message to nationalist academics and bloggers like Lu and Zhang that the Jews are now fair game for their vitriol. It is no coincidence that Lu Kewen's rant came out in late May 2021, just after Israel's war with Hamas was over. 

What the synagogue in Kaifeng used to look like before it was destroyed in the 19th century.

All of this is all particularly unfortunate because China often used to seem strangely impervious to antisemitism, especially when compared to other forms of racist discourse from abroad. 

There is no native Chinese tradition of antisemitism, unsurprisingly for a culture so far removed from the monotheistic world-view. China's one and only "native" Jewish community, based in Kaifeng, was historically left alone until it assimilated of its own accord. European Jews who found refuge in Shanghai in the 1930s are said to have got along well with the locals, and Republic of China diplomat Ho Feng-Shan was later recognised for saving thousands of Austrian Jews from the Holocaust by issuing them humanitarian visas for Shanghai. Jews have never seen China as a hostile country, and with good reason.

In fact, over the past century China has developed an odd kind of "philosemitism". Many of the reformers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century, for instance Liang Qichao, admired the Jews as a resourceful people who had done well for themselves in spite of lacking a homeland and being persecuted. Many of them seemed to have believed exaggerated tales of Jewish wealth and influence that they heard from Europeans, but this did not cause them to resent the Jews. Instead, they wondered what the Chinese might learn from them. Sun Yatsen himself admired the Jews and sympathised with the Zionist movement.

This Chinese philosemitism is still alive today. On the (rare) occasions when I have brought up my Jewish roots in conversation with local people in China, I have often been told something along the lines that Jews are known to be "very intelligent". The Jews' presumed superior intelligence and education seems, in fact, to be the single most well-known "fact" about them in China. The stereotype of Jews being good at business also survives, but it is not seen as something negative, just as further proof of their smartness. These attitudes have given rise to an entire cottage industry of cheesy self-help books purporting to uncover the secrets of how Jews do business or how they educate their children to be so successful.

In spite of the Mao-era support for the Arabs, Israel has also sometimes attracted admiration in China. The Israelis are seen as a tough bunch who take no nonsense from anyone, look after their own and create first-rate technology, qualities highly prized by Chinese nationalists. There is no tradition of opposition to Zionism, a term that is not particularly well-known in China, either in English or in its Chinese translation (犹太复国主义, or "ideology of recreating the Jewish nation"). 

Of course, a philosemitism which is not based on any genuine understanding can easily turn into something darker, especially once you throw in the eternal stereotype of the Jew as a shrewd businessman. One only needs to see the CGTN video linked above, or the way that Fudan University historian Wen Yang, another egregious nationalist, responded to David P. Goldman's arguments on China's potential global economic hegemony: apparently Goldman (who is a secular American Jew) was "revealing his Jewish mindset that everything is commercial", and projecting the Jews' "parasitic business model" onto China.

The bottom line is that relations between China and the US are at their lowest ebb since the death of Mao, and the Chinese leadership has abandoned its long-held attitude of being guarded and non-confrontational in international affairs. Israel is obviously a strong US ally (although it manages to maintain decent ties with Russia and China), and sooner or later this was bound to be reflected in Chinese attitudes towards it and towards Jews in general, especially when it comes to the anti-Western nationalists who have the upper hand in public discourse. Unless there is a general improvement in China's relationship with the US and with the West, we may well see more of this "antisemitism with Chinese characteristics" in the future. 

Shanghai's lockdown: the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?

Over the last couple of years, I have got used to a sense of the surreal permeating my daily life. All kind of things have happened which I would have dismissed as impossible back in 2019, and I have mostly adapted. 

I can now add another surreal experience to the collection: the feeling of living my normal life in Beijing, going to the office, eating out and taking yoga classes by the Liangma River, while people I know down in Shanghai are imprisoned in their flats and literally going hungry. 

A couple of weeks ago a German analyst I have worked with in the past, who resides in Shanghai with his wife and small child, wrote the following message in a WeChat group of which I am part: "People are seriously short of basic food, not having been able to order anything for days (same for us, my colleagues and friends). When asked what you do if you don't have basic food, he replied: "At this time it depends on your neighbourhood - and there are stories of people starving (already for weeks, as some districts have been on full lockdown for four weeks). There are stories of poisoning where people tried to eat old food, or even tried to eat non-food items. Water is another basic problem." 

If I happened to be living in Shanghai, instead of Beijing, this could have been me. Never in a million years would I have imagined I would see China's most prosperous and orderly city suffer widespread hunger as a result of government policies to stamp out a virus, and yet here we are. 

Here in Beijing, life is still relatively normal. People have been hoarding food after seeing the events unfolding in Shanghai, but for now there seems to be no real need. Offices are open, cafés are full and streets are bustling. The odd new Covid case leads to a building or a neighbourhood getting locked down, but this has been happening on and off for two years, and everyone's used to it. As long as it isn't your own neighbourhood that's affected, you don't even think about it. I have not personally been required to do a PCR test since the last time I left Beijing in January (but this very much depends on your job and where you live).

Of course, travel into Beijing from other provinces has been seriously curtailed. If you leave the city, you run a serious risk of not being allowed back in for a while. Even people who commute every day from Yanjiao, just across the border in Hebei, have been forced to work from home. During the recent national holidays for Tomb Sweeping Day, the furthest you could go was basically the mountains north and west of the city that still fall within the municipal boundaries. Crossing into a different province spells trouble. No one knows when this will change.

But more than that, it is the events in Shanghai that seem to have shaken many people around me out of their complacency. It is looking more and more like China's Zero-Covid policy has no endgame. This could mean more years ahead of never knowing when you or your city might suddenly be placed in lockdown, not to mention travel within China being restricted and international travel almost impossible. These measures don't impact everyone equally, but in one way or another they affect most of society. 

For foreign residents like me, the big question is whether to remain in China or not. Many of the foreigners still here are definitely considering packing up and leaving. This may not matter much to Chinese society, but it certainly matters to me. In Shanghai some of the foreign residents have already left the country if they could, with no plans to return. I have heard stories of foreigners walking or cycling for hours through empty streets to get to Pudong airport and take a flight out, since taxis and public transport are suspended. There will probably be quite an exodus once the lockdown is lifted.

The mood amongst foreigners in Beijing is also rather sombre. In many ways the last two years have not been a bad time to be in China, since you were safe from the virus and daily life was mostly normal. But now there is a general feeling that a turning point has been reached, with China doubling down on its anti-Covid crusade while the rest of the world moves on.

Even more than the prospect of Shanghai-style lockdowns, it is the near-impossibility of going back home and seeing their families that is pushing foreigners here to call it quits, especially since there really seems to be no prospect of this situation changing. Foreigners still in China are probably the ones most committed to their lives and careers here, but even they are starting to falter. I have heard more than one person say they are now making exit plans. 

When the dust finally settles, the air of cosmopolitanism that parts of Shanghai and Beijing had acquired will be all but gone, with just a few diplomats, journalists, shills and people with Chinese family still hanging around. Probably just a side-show in a drama affecting 1.4 billion people, but still one worth commenting on, with ramifications that go beyond the disruption to individual lives.

Witnessing the mess going on in Shanghai has been particularly shocking to many, because it is a city that often feels like a bubble of internationalism and good governance, worlds apart from the rest of China. In fact, over the past year, Shanghai had often been upheld as an example of a more humane approach to achieving "Zero Covid": the city avoided the most extreme excesses of other regions, quarantining those infected and their close contacts but not entire neighbourhoods, and doing its best not to disrupt people's lives with unnecessary measures taken "just to be on the safe side". 

And yet, over the last month all the most inflexible and inhumane of China's "pandemic-control" measures have been on full display in China's showcase metropolis. Covid-infected toddlers have been quarantined without their parents in dubious conditions (after a huge public outcry, they announced this would change). More and more people with medical conditions other than Covid are finding they can't receive treatment, and in some cases are dying (it seems nothing has been learnt from January's sad events in Xi'an). The pets of the infected have been brutally killed, or left to starve in empty flats. Outsiders unlucky enough to get stuck in the city have had to sleep in the open.

Those infected have been carted off to empty factories and hangars re-purposed as quarantine centres, where they are given nothing but a bed with a thin mattress and a blanket in a room shared with hundreds of others. Showering is impossible, getting some sleep amid the noise is a challenge and the food is unappetising. In extreme cases, those quarantined have been filmed fighting over food.

The real shocker is the system's inability to deliver enough food to the population, especially since this was never an issue in Wuhan or anywhere else. Reports claim the problem is not a lack of food, just that many of the workers who would normally deliver it are in lockdown, and suppliers outside the city have trouble getting permits for drivers to enter and leave Shanghai. Things are now getting better, but securing enough food remains a struggle. I would have assumed that the authorities would rather end the lockdown than let people go hungry, but it seems that as long as actual mass starvation can be avoided, fighting the pandemic comes first. 

It is clear that in Shanghai there is real anger about what's going on. People placed in unsanitary and crowded quarantine centres have been on the verge of rioting. Plenty of videos show crowds protesting the lockdown of their neighbourhoods, breaking through quarantine barriers in mass and fighting with the police and health workers. Rappers stuck in their homes record songs where they rail against the system. The faceless "health workers" with their bodies covered in white are often on the receiving end of people's fury, although they may just be poor migrants going from city to city looking for jobs in this booming new sector.

People have been dragged kicking and screaming into quarantine, and arrested for refusing to get tested. Other videos show individuals going on rants against the government or flatly refusing to wear a mask and stay home. Such videos get censored quickly on WeChat and Weibo, but not before someone has uploaded them to Twitter, preserving them for posterity.

The most surreal video of all has to be the one of people chanting from their balconies to protest the lack of supplies. A drone then comes down from the sky, and intones in a robotic voice "Please comply with Covid restrictions. Control your soul's desire for freedom." The word "dystopian" gets used a lot in relation to China, not always fairly, but sometimes they really are asking for it.

The discontent isn't limited to Shanghai either. All over the country, cities and neighbourhoods in lockdown have been the scene of protests, unrest and arguments between ordinary people and the health workers in white suits. People like this guy are at the end of their tether. The poor can no longer stand the impact on their earnings: in this video of a protest last month in Langfang, Hebei Province, people can be heard yelling 解封！老百姓活不了！(End the lockdown! We laobaixing can't survive!) 

So what's the big picture? China's "Dynamic Zero Covid" policy has clearly reached a turning point. There are at least three cities (Shanghai, Changchun and Jilin) where the virus has spread widely in the community, leading to dozens of thousands of cases. This hadn't happened since February 2020 in Wuhan. The infectious nature of Omicron makes it far harder to nip every new outbreak in the bud and carry on as normal, as China has been doing for two years. 

When cases started sky-rocketing, many thought the authorities would finally have to abandon their commitment to a Covid-free China. I was sceptical they would, and I am being proven right. The reality is that, while there are Omicron outbreaks all over China, they have been or are being put down almost everywhere. Cases in Changchun and Jilin have already decreased sharply. It is only Shanghai that is still recording massive numbers, and even there we seem to be past the peak.  

We know that Omicron outbreaks spread fast and peak within a month or two, even without the sort of draconian measures China takes, and the authorities clearly intend to keep Shanghai insulated from the rest of China until the outbreak has died out or been stamped out. As long as they can deliver enough food to prevent actual starvation, I don't see a general anti-lockdown rebellion taking place, just isolated acts of disobedience and unrest. The fact that even respected scientists who advocate for a different approach get censored doesn't bode well for those hoping for change.

The real question is, why are the men who run China still so hell-bent on stopping Covid from spreading? The virus just isn't as dangerous as it used to be, and most of those infected have mild or no symptoms. Officially nearly a hundred people have died in the current outbreak in Shanghai (most were unvaccinated or had other serious conditions). There are good reasons to assume the true death toll is higher, given how deaths from Covid are recorded in China, but we are not talking about massive numbers. In Shanghai people seem to be more worried about getting stuck in a horrible quarantine facility than about the actual virus.

I happen to think that the "Zero Covid" approach was justified in 2020 and most of 2021, when the virus was more virulent and people weren't vaccinated. Implementation was unnecessarily draconian and could leave you feeling trapped in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic dystopia, but there's no denying that a few million lives were saved. This approach was also genuinely popular with the public, and in fact it provided China's authoritarian one-party system with added legitimacy in the eyes of its people. Now it feels like part of that legitimacy is being squandered, because the guys in charge just don't know when it's time to change course.

There is a popular take going around internationally, according to which China's real problem is that they vaccinated their population with "ineffective" Chinese vaccines, and that if they only used the Western MRNA vaccines they could then open up. The thing is, though, that it's just not true the local vaccines are no use. Data from Hong Kong suggests they are almost equally effective as Pfeizer after a booster, while a study from Singapore found a bigger gap, but it seems clear that they also offer decent protection against severe symptoms and death. The reality is that China would probably be following the same policies even if they had been using the Pfizer vaccine all along.

Behind the continuing lockdowns there seems to be a conviction that if the virus is allowed to spread there will be countless deaths and hospitals will be overwhelmed. It is interesting to read this article by "Chairman Rabbit", a well-known nationalist blogger who is also the grandson of an important Communist Party politician. He is not a government official himself, but his post is a good example of the kind of thinking that lies behind the continued support for Zero-Covid in China. 

The article engages in some questionable maths to claim that, based on Hong Kong's experience, hundreds of thousands, millions "or even more" deaths could occur throughout China if restrictions are lifted. It claims that "It is politically and culturally impossible for the Chinese government and civil society to allow lifting restrictions at the cost of massive human lives". 

In the end, it manages to wax lyrical about China's approach to the pandemic, claiming: "China's ultimate goal is to become the only country in human society that truly avoids massive loss of human lives due to COVID-19. The digital governance, grid-based grassroots governance, and a community-wide public health model that China is exploring, will not only be used to deal with COVID-19, but also with the more horrific viruses and superbugs that humanity may encounter in the future. If China can blaze such a path, it will be a success for the country as well as a contribution to human civilization".

I find the argument that it is "culturally" impossible for China to lift the restrictions to be quite disingenuous, in a culture that often takes pride in sacrificing the individual for the needs of the collective. At this point, it feels like the collective is being asked to make sacrifices for the sake of the minority of individuals who would die or be left disabled by Covid. The part that's probably true, however, is that lifting the restrictions is politically impossible. 

The simple truth is that the ruling party has staked too much credibility on its ability to stop China being overwhelmed by this virus, and it cannot easily change course. Especially after telling everyone who would listen about how much better China's response was than America's, and how this proves the superiority of the Chinese system, they can't allow ugly scenes of death and overwhelmed hospitals to play out all over the country. Also, they come from a political culture where sacrificing the comfort, dignity, and even life of individual citizens in pursuit of greater national goals is the right and proper thing to do.

It may well be true, of course, that China would see a lot of deaths if Covid were allowed to run rampant. After all, even major European countries are still seeing a few hundred deaths a day due to the pandemic, something which the public has become inured to. One of China's major issues is that the elderly have low vaccination rates. The authorities are now trying to push them to get their shots, but apparently don't feel comfortable mandating vaccinations (on the other hand, they do feel comfortable forcing 25 million people to stay at home for weeks without enough food). 

Ironically, and maddeningly, there is much less pressure on people to get vaccinated in China than in most of the world. Proof of vaccination is not required for most work or travel within the country, and getting inoculated remains a personal choice. Vaccines don't do the heavy lifting in China, lockdowns and PCR tests do. 

Personally, I see no justification for the continuation of the Zero-Covid approach. At this point, avoiding the potential deaths Covid might cause just cannot justify the disruption to millions of lives, or the damage to people's physical and mental health and, yes, to the economy (in the imperfect world we live in, real people suffer when the economy tanks). 

Of course, it's not surprising that I might feel this way. After all I come from a Western country, so I must be "overly attached to personal freedom", as I have sometimes been told here in China over the past two years. The real question is how many Chinese are starting to agree with me.

No doubt there is serious public discontent about what is going on in Shanghai. People in other cities are not thrilled at the idea that something similar might happen to them next. I personally know many Chinese, mostly young and well-educated, who understand that Covid is not the threat it used to be and think that it is time to move towards living with the virus. I often hear people around me express exasperation about the strictness of the anti-pandemic measures, in a way they didn't a year or six months ago. 

Yesterday's sudden wave of subversion on WeChat is a signal of the frustration and anger felt by parts of the population. The only other times I remember seeing such a lot of subversive sentiment openly expressed on my WeChat feed by normally apolitical people was in early February 2020, after Dr. Li Wenliang died in Wuhan, and in February 2018, after the presidential term limits were abolished.

All this doesn't alter the fact that there is still a large base of public support for keeping China Covid-free. There are plenty of people who are happy for extreme measures to be taken to keep Covid out, at least as long as they themselves don't get hit with the consequences. The idea that Covid is highly dangerous and should not be accepted as a normal part of life has been deeply implanted in people's minds. It is also not clear if older and less online members of the public realise how bad things have got in Shanghai, since the Chinese media don't really report on the food shortages, the horrible quarantine centres and the widespread anger. 

Conveniently and predictably, much of the blame for the problems in Shanghai is being placed on the local government, in the same way that much of the initial anger about the cover ups in Wuhan was directed at the local authorities. When it can't be denied that things have gone awry, blaming incompetence and corruption at the local level is always the easiest safety-valve. 

What's more, Shanghai's government is being blamed not only for mishandling the distribution of food, but also for being too lax about "pandemic-control" in the beginning, allowing the number of cases to spiral out of control. The only lesson the authorities may learn from all this is that Shanghai's more relaxed and less arbitrary measures (what they call "precise" prevention and control) were the problem, because they simply could not contain Omicron. From their point of view, they are right. If you want to contain a virus this infectious you have to use a sledgehammer, not a chisel. Quarantine entire neighbourhoods indefinitely for a single case, lock away anyone who's been anywhere near a positive case, don't even care if their pets are left to die, and then you might actually succeed.

Right now, it looks like what the future holds for China is ever stricter measures to make sure Omicron doesn't spread to begin with. Shanghai will be locked down for as long as it takes for the outbreak to end. A few lives will be lost, either to hunger or lack of medical care, but apparently this is considered a price worth paying. More cities will be locked down when new cases appear. Travel between provinces will become much harder than it was even in 2020-21. Most importantly to me personally, travelling to China from abroad will get even more difficult, or in any case no easier. It may not go back to normal for years.

There are those who predict things may loosen up after the big Party Congress to be held in the Autumn, when Xi will be reconfirmed for his third term in power. Now others are starting to say that they'll wait until the Two Sessions in March 2023. I've been hearing such predictions for a long time. A year ago, people were saying that China would have to open up before the Winter Olympics. Then it became after the Olympics. The reality is that this guessing game is futile, because no one knows. It is probably true that once Xi has been reconfirmed in power, the government will start to study a way out of this impasse, but even then it will not be a quick transition. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us can do nothing but sit back and watch the spectacle of the largest battle ever fought between human beings and a virus play out in real time. If nothing else we will find out what it really takes to contain this virus, and also what happens when a modern country seals its borders almost entirely for a number of years. There might be some lessons in there for the rest of us.  

Hainan

This winter I visited Hainan, one of the few provinces of the PRC that I had yet to set foot in (the ones I still haven't been to are now Heilongjiang, Jilin, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei and the Tibetan Autonomous Region). 

As China's only tropical island, Hainan is known as the country's prime destination for sun-and-sand holidays. Before the pandemic I was never too interested in going there, preferring to fly to places like Malaysia or Thailand if I wanted a winter getaway in the tropics. But China's pandemic-era border policies have suddenly made Hainan seem like a much more attractive destination. As December rolled around and the mercury dipped below freezing in Beijing, with rumours of the Winter Olympics precipitating further city-wide lockdowns, I decided to buy a cheap ticket to Hainan (tickets from Beijing really are extremely cheap this winter, costing less than 1000 Yuan for a four-hour flight).

I spent most of my time in Hainan on the coast, near the cities of Wanning and Sanya, where most tourists go. In Wanning I stayed in Riyuewan (the "Sun and Moon Bay"), a little coastal town which has become a Mecca for China's surfing community. Surfing has exploded in China over the past few years, and Riyuewan has exploded with it. It used to be a quiet little fishing community, but the seafront now has a long strip of hotels, cafes and restaurants, most of which didn't exist a year ago. More are being built all the time. 

I arrived on December 23rd, and the town was bustling. Expats from Beijing and Shanghai who had flown down for their Christmas breaks mixed with young Chinese surfers and provincial Chinese sightseers. I was impressed, I have to say, by the sophistication of the food and dining options on offer. The town had a number of good-quality cafes and Western and Thai restaurants which would not have felt out of place in Shanghai (they also had Shanghai prices, unfortunately). Ten or even five years ago it was hard to find such places in Chinese tourist spots, but people's tastes are obviously getting more cosmopolitan.

While there is clearly a community of hard-core surfers in Wanning, many of them dressed in baggy trousers or sporting dreadlocks, they seemed to be outnumbered by visitors attempting to surf for the first time. As with many new fads in China, there's a lot of enthusiasm and willingness to try, but not many people with experience. The stretch of sea where the surfing instructors take their students was packed during the day, and it's a wonder that I didn't see any amateur surfers crash into each other. I actually tried a class myself, for the steep sum of 500 Yuan. It was fun to try, but water sports aren't really my thing, and I found it exceedingly hard to stand up on the surf board without immediately falling over again. 

Riyuewan's beach promenade

In Sanya I spent time in two places, Houhai and Yalong Bay, both of which are well-known tourist hotspots. Houhai is Hainan's party town, a little village on the sea which almost feels like Thailand. The village is small and you can walk everywhere, and once you are there you generally don't leave (the city of Sanya is at least an hour away by taxi). The atmosphere is as laid-back as it gets in China, with people walking around in swimwear and taking sips from coconuts on the pavements. A number of bars spill out onto the beach, where there are parties with DJs every night. 

Once again I was impressed by the quality of the restaurants and cafes, although less so by the hotels. I ended up staying for a couple of nights in a pretty awful budget hotel, as bad as any you might find near a bus station in a provincial Chinese city. Later I moved somewhere nicer, but prices were generally expensive for what was on offer. The constant noise from the streets and the bars made it hard to sleep, too.

I arrived in Houhai a few days before the New Year, and the town was packed with holidaymakers, including seemingly about half the foreigners still left in China. Unable to go to Thailand or fly home for Christmas, lots of expats decided to make their way to this town at the very southern tip of China's territory (it is at the same latitude as Central Vietnam) to celebrate the New Year. I am no longer used to seeing this many non-Chinese people in one place in China, and the effect was rather surreal. Between that and the laid-back atmosphere, it almost felt like I was no longer in the same country. The party on the beach on New Year's Eve went on way into the night, with plenty of fireworks, something that is no longer allowed in Beijing. 

The sea in Houhai was full of people surfing, mostly first-timers, just like in Riyuewan. The waters are actually rather dangerous, with plenty of treacherous undercurrents, and accidents do happen. The beach had a large notice on it clearly stating that swimming and surfing are forbidden, but it was widely ignored. I found this same easy-going attitude towards rules and regulations on display everywhere in Hainan, in contrast with much of China, which over the last decade has become a country of rules that actually have to be followed (by us common mortals, at least). I guess the famous "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" saying still means something on this island province.

The local authorities also seem to be quite relaxed about anti-pandemic regulations, and much more welcoming towards foreigners than in many other provinces. Although a hotel in Baoting and one in Sanya did cancel my booking after they realised I was a foreign citizen, most hotels seem to have no restrictions on hosting foreigners. Most hotels didn't ask to see a Health Code, and no one ever asked me how long it is since I have last entered China. I also encountered no police checkpoints between cities even in the "autonomous" ethnic minority county I visited, in sharp contrast with many areas of China. 

Couple shooting wedding photo, Yalong Bay

Yoga class on the beach, Houhai

After Houhai I moved to Yalong Bay, a bit further down the coast, which had a completely different vibe. It felt more like Florida, an area of fancy resorts, shopping malls and boulevards lined with palm trees. The beach was full of families on vacation and Chinese couples taking their wedding photos. I also hopped over to Dadong Hai, the area of the city of Sanya closest to the sea, where people go for the bars and nightlife. The signs in Russian in the bar street attest to the fact that before the pandemic a lot of Russians used to visit Sanya. 

Although I went to Hainan mainly to relax and get away from the winter cold, I did want to leave the coast and do a little bit of exploring, so I went to up Baoting for a couple of nights. Baoting is a town in the interior, north of Sanya, which serves as the capital of the Baoting Li and Miao Autonomous County. Hainan, although known in the rest of China mainly as a resort island, is actually quite ethnically diverse. As large as Taiwan, and with ten million inhabitants, it has an interior mostly untouched by mass tourism. The original inhabitants are the Li people, who speak a language related to Thai and have lived on the island for thousands of years.

Although the Han Chinese have been residing in Hainan for over a thousand years, they only really started moving there en masse in the 16th and 17th centuries, when they took over all the areas capable of intense cultivation and the Li people were pushed into the mountains. To this day there are over a million Li in Hainan, living mostly in the mountains in the south of the island. A lot of them fought as communist guerrillas during the Second World War and were massacred by the Guomindang and the Japanese, something which has placed them in good stead with the Communist Party. There are also quite a few Miao people in the island, the descendants of soldiers who were brought over centuries ago to put down a rebellion by the Li and ended up staying and settling in the mountains beside them.

In Baoting I saw little obvious sign of this ethnic diversity, except for a a few elderly women in traditional clothing, but the provincial town did feel a world away from flashy Sanya. I had to take a long-distance bus to get there, since train lines in Hainan don't extend beyond the coast. I climbed the nearby Qixianling mountain, well known for the seven ridges at the top which give it its name (the seven-fairy mountain), while I took in the tropical vegetation. The area nearby is famed for its hot springs, and a number of resorts have been built for tourists.

I got a better taste of Hainan's diversity in Wanning, when I rented an electric scooter and took a day trip to the nearby "Bali village". The village is located inland, next to the town of Xinglong. The town was created by Chinese-Indonesians who "returned" to China in the 50s, escaping from anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia. The Party settled them in this corner of Hainan, where the tropical climate was similar to Indonesia and they would be able to plant the same crops. 

The "Bali village" was mostly a collection of exhibits and buildings built in a Balinese style in the middle of the rainforest. The place was staffed by local women dressed in traditional Balinese costumes, in a display of what would now be called "cultural appropriation" in the West. There were also some partisan but interesting explanations on the history of the Chinese-Indonesians in the area. While it was all slightly kitsch, the tropical forest all around gave me the illusion that I was actually in Bali. 

After visiting the Bali village, I got back on my scooter and drove to Xinglong. While it looks like any Southern Chinese town, I ate in a local restaurant where much of the food was clearly Indonesian-influenced, including the little cakes. Between the tropical scenery, the food and the fact that I was getting around by scooter, it almost felt like I was in fact back in Indonesia. You can find a surprisingly frank description of the area's history by China Daily here. 

The entrance to the Bali Village

Replica Balinese pavilion

Local women dressed in Balinese costume

The seven peaks of Qixianling

Hainan has many other interesting pockets of ethnic diversity, for instance a small community of Utsul who fled there from Vietnam centuries ago, and are classified as Hui by the state because they are Muslims (it seems they have not escaped the general crackdown on Islamic practice going on all over the country). There are also small communities of what used to be called "Sea Gypsies", a Chinese-speaking ethnic group who traditionally live on boats. It would be interesting, one day, to visit all of these areas. 

All in all, I was quite impressed with Hainan. I was, to be honest, expecting the resort towns to be garish and overcrowded, but they were, for the most part, nice places to relax. The mountainous interior of the island, at least in the less populous South, seemed lush and not too commercialised. The fact that public transport is rather underdeveloped by Chinese standards, with train lines only connecting the main cities on the coast, probably helps to keep things that way. The local people seemed remarkably friendly and easy-going, helping to make the island feel more like South-East Asia than China. 

The view behind my guesthouse, near Riyuewan

China books of the year in review: Red Roulette and Invisible China

I read a lot of books in 2021, a handful of which were on China. There were two China-related books that really stood out for me: Red Roulette by Desmond Shum, and Invisible China by Scott Rozelle. 

If you take an interest in Chinese affairs, you've probably heard of the first book. It's a memoir by a man who reached the top echelons of China's business world thanks to his marriage to a woman, Whitney Duang, who had cultivated deep connections within the Communist Party's leadership. The couple were central to a number of important deals, including a project to expand Beijing's Capital Airport. Mr. Shum later fell out of favour and left China, while his former wife and business partner was disappeared by the Chinese state. 

The book is a very readable and revealing depiction of how things work at the top of the Chinese system. Shum is from Shanghai, but grew up mostly in colonial Hong Kong and studied in the US, so he possesses both an outsider's and an insider's perspective on China. Others have already analysed Shum's revelations concerning the country's top leaders and their shady deals, and the general conclusion is that he is telling the truth, if perhaps not all of it. 

What I found particularly interesting, though, is the insight the memoir provides regarding the political and psychological factors that motivated Shum and his wife. Billionaires like to think they are moved by more than just greed, and these two were no exception. Once the couple had made it to the top, they convinced themselves that they could use their position to push for broader positive change in China as a whole. 

Shum felt political change would be beneficial to him personally, and thinks other entrepreneurs shared his ideals: "those of us who identified as capitalists wanted a voice. We wanted protection for our property, our investments, and other rights. We wanted, if not an independent judiciary, at least a fair one where judgments were made on the basis of law, and not on the whims of the local party boss. We craved predictability in government policies, because only then could we invest with confidence."

He got involved in philanthropy, creating a scholarship for students from poor regions studying in Tsinghua. He also joined the Beijing branch of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), officially China's "second parliament", which as he says himself was more of a networking platform. "Membership was a sign that the Party saw you as a potentially useful agent of the party's influence." He noticed that bolder members of the body were starting to advocate for democracy within the Party, and he wondered if the CPPCC could become more relevant, like a real second chamber of parliament.

Shums' wife Whitney, who had grown up in anonymity in Shandong, was a Christian, and wished for more religious freedom, or at least a recognition that you could "love god and love China at the same time". Shum and Whitney worked with foreign think tanks to educate Chinese scholars about how democracies work, and around 2010 they funded a European delegation led by Romano Prodi to come to China and have a private chat on foreign policy with Chinese officials. As he puts it, "we tried not to cross any redlines. We truly believed in the promise of China. We were all in." 

Around the turn of the decade, Shum noticed with concern that things had started to change. In 2013 he was summoned to a meeting of the Beijing CPPCC, where a senior official gave a hard-line speech that put to rest any fantasies of democratic reform. Then in 2014, Shum and other CPPCC members from the Hong Kong SARS (the place where he grew up and of which he is a citizen) were directed to go to Hong Kong and take part in an organised counter-protest against the Umbrella Movement. Shum made sure he was seen at the march, even though he didn't really believe in what he was marching for. Quite simply, he was deeply embedded in the system and could not afford to break ranks.

In the end the couple paid the price for having got to the top through the support of prime minister Wen Jiabao's wife. After Xi took office, and Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao's allies were purged one by one, this turned into a liability. Meanwhile the couple grew estranged and divorced, after which Shum had to threaten his wife in order to ensure that she gave him a fair amount of the funds from their joint business, since she controlled all their money and the local courts could not be relied upon to protect his interests. Disillusioned with China, he left and made a life for himself in Britain with his son, while his wife met the unfortunate fate of disappearing into detention.

In the end, it is hard to argue with Shum's conclusion that modern China is a harsh, unforgiving place. It must also be said, though, that he comes across as an opportunist who is now spilling the beans because he has nothing left to lose. It is true that it was easier to believe in democratic change back in the 2000s, and I have no doubt that he was genuinely convinced he was helping to steer the country in the right direction. At the same time, I would advance a guess that Shum would never have left China and rejected the system if he had been given a chance to hold on to his billions and his privileged position.

The other book, Invisible China: how the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise, focuses on a problem that tends to be overlooked: the dismal educational and cognitive level of a big chunk of China's population, particularly in the countryside, and how this affects the country's prospects. The book makes a very convincing case that much of the Chinese population is simply not skilled enough to take up the kind of jobs in services that will open up once the manufacturing jobs move to cheaper countries, and this could keep China stuck in the so-called "middle-income trap" that bedevils countries like Mexico, Brazil and South Africa.

The book is co-authored by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, two Stanford scholars. The most well known of the two is Rozelle, an American economist who has spent 30 years researching poverty and education in rural China. Over the years he has drawn some criticism for his positions, but he clearly knows what he is talking about. The book uncovers a reality that is not easy to see for those who only experience middle-class urban China. 

First of all, it may be a revelation for some to realise that China's masses are in fact under-educated relative to other countries that are similarly or less developed. In 2015, 70% of working-age adults in China had not completed high-school, compared to 58% in South Africa and 42% in the Philippines. Even among Chinese 25 to 34 year olds, the figure was 60%.

Rozelle and Hell place part of the blame for this on the fact that, during the first decades of the "reform and opening up", public education was not really made a priority by Chinese administrations. School attendance was not mandatory or free of charge, and tuition fees often kept poorer children from going past primary school. Things have changed since then, with the first nine years of schooling made mandatory and free in 2006, and attendance in junior high school becoming almost universal. Even attendance in senior high school is increasing, with 80% of 15 to 17 year olds in school in 2015, up from 53% in 2005.

But these gains are probably insufficient. Educational levels remain worrying low among rural youth. This is hardly a small issue, when you consider that in 2015, 75% of Chinese children under three had a rural hukou, meaning that regardless of where they actually lived, they can be counted as "rural" in terms of their access to education. 

Rozelle and Hell claim that rural schools in China have improved a lot over the last decades. They now have qualified teachers, good facilities, and the same curriculums as everywhere else in the country. Senior high school is still not free, however, and the cost remains considerable for rural families. But there is an even more basic problem: most rural youth in China suffer from cognitive deficiencies and learning difficulties because of problems that begin at home.

First of all, the health of rural children is dismal. Millions of them suffer from iron-deficiency anemia, which is strongly correlated with worse educational outcomes, and intestinal worms. Millions more are short-sighted and are not given the glasses they need, which obviously impacts their schooling. These problems could easily be solved with cheap medication, food supplements and glasses, but they are not addressed because no on understands their importance. Millions of "left-behind children" have parents who work in the cities, and are brought up by grandparents who are usually barely literate, and do not realise that these health issues exist, or believe destructive myths about them (you need intestinal worms to digest your food; if a child wears glasses, their vision will deteriorate further).

What's more, most of these children suffer from a lifelong cognitive deficiency compared to urban children because of they way they are brought up as toddlers. In rural areas caregivers, even if loving, do not talk to their babies and stimulate them in the way that parents naturally do in urban China and in richer countries. Babies may spend hours strapped to their grandmother's back, without any stimulation whatsoever. By the time they are three, they already score worse on cognitive tests compared to urban children, and they will probably carry this disadvantaged throughout their lives. These problems ensure that, no matter how good Chinese rural schools become, or how many children go to them, educational and cognitive levels will remain low. 

The book's arguments are compelling. The countries that made it out of the "middle-income trap" in recent decades, like South Korea and Ireland, all invested heavily in education, and a much higher proportion of the workforce had completed high school by that point compared to China today. If this issue gets so little attention, it may be because most foreign analysts, and the Chinese they talk with, spend so little time in rural China. It is very hard to remember, when you visit the campuses of globally competitive and well-funded universities like Tsinghua, that average educational levels across the country are so low. It is also hard to remember, when you only travel in high-speed trains and only stay in the nicer parts of China's huge and well-run cities, that there is another China, one of unheated rural homes, poverty and left-behind children.

What I find less convincing are the book's general predictions about China. It may well be that, due to the problems it describes and other factors, China will indeed remain stuck in a middle-income state. I find it hard to imagine, as Rozelle and Hell predict, that this could lead to a collapse in law and order, as unemployed and aimless young men turn to crime. Their point of comparison seem to be Mexico and Brazil, societies which have indeed been beset by gang violence and appalling crime rates for decades. This does not mean, however, that things would have to go the same way in China. Countries in Asia that some might describe as falling into the "middle-income trap", like Malaysia, hardly seem to be mired in criminality. China is also far better organised and more regimented than most countries, and it seems unlikely that a massive wave of crime could really take off under the Party's watch. 

It is also a fact that today's "middle-income" China is already an economic and military superpower simply as a function of its size, in spite of its poor rural interior. This was never true of Mexico, Brazil or South Africa. Even if it remains more or less stuck at its current level of development, I see no reason to believe that China cannot continue to be an internally stable and externally assertive power, or that its rulers will stop wanting to remodel the international order in a way that is more congenial to them.