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.