Chapter 5Zero-Covid
China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal-minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom. I lived through all three years of the zero-Covid strategy that China pursued to stomp out the highly transmissible virus. In the first year, the country felt like a realm of serene calm after it pushed out the virus that was raging far away. In the second year, it still felt pretty good, though all of us were getting antsy as we wondered how the government would organize its exit from the policy. In the third year, everything went to smash.
In 2020, at the end of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I moved from Beijing to Shanghai. I was driven away as much by the intensity of Beijing’s political temperament as I was drawn by the splendor of Shanghai’s commercial character.
Beijing had been China’s seat of empire for centuries when Stalinist architects began, in 1949, to reshape the city for socialist magnificence. Visitors from Shanghai liked to tease those of us in Beijing: “Why would you live in Pyongyang when you can live in Paris?” It was annoying. Then the SARS-CoV2 virus burst out from Wuhan. Pandemic regulations made Beijing an even more tightly controlled city than in normal times. When I heeded these exhortations and made the move to Shanghai, which imposed substantially looser restrictions, life really did feel cheerier. People were walking the streets, many of them unmasked in Shanghai’s considerably warmer clime, out and about having a great time.
Before Soviet-trained engineers refashioned Beijing for monumentalism, the French built Shanghai for pleasure. Colonial powers transformed Shanghai from a modest trading port in the nineteenth century into the beachhead for foreign powers to penetrate the country’s giant market. The British, the Americans, and the French each carved out enclaves where their residents could disregard Chinese law. The second-largest bank house in the world was built in the British and American zone, alongside insurers, trading companies, and leisure clubs that established themselves around a bend of the Huangpu River. These testaments to European colonial power—some of the tallest buildings in Asia when they were constructed—look as if they were lifted from the banks of the Thames. They are still there today, a beautiful and odd part of Shanghai’s skyline. Chinese flags flutter atop every steeple or spire: the modern state’s unsubtle reminder that the colonial era is over.
The French established a concession distinct from the British and American zones. The area was filled less with grand buildings than with gardens and residences. Leafy plane trees, common in parks in London and Paris, lined the streets. Shanghai was the first city in Asia to adopt modern amenities like public electric lights, a tram line, a stock exchange, department stores, and cinemas. No wonder it was then nicknamed the “Paris of the East.”
Shanghai was controlled by foreigners, not Chinese, and these foreigners were merchants, not officials. Though a proliferation of sovereignties produced occasional friction, everyone worked harmoniously to make Shanghai a city of indulgence. Well-to-do families could shop New York fashions. Macy’s had a department store on the city’s main promenade. Those who were in the market for less wholesome fun could find it only a few streets away—at cabarets and jazz clubs, with sing-song girls and Japanese geishas, in Chinese card games and Western slot machines. Shanghai was, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the brothel capital of the world. The city was also full of opium dens, consuming perhaps 90 percent of the world’s narcotic drugs. Professional Chinese criminal organizations ran this vice trade and became as powerful as any other political authority in the city.
Shanghai dimmed in the 1930s after Japan began its brutal invasion. Through that decade, the city became a shatter zone of sundry peoples: still the home of Western businessmen, their fortunes made by introducing skin creams, cigarettes, and modern extravagances to Asian buyers; a burgeoning middle class of Chinese who worked in the country’s most industrial city; a vast number of itinerant workers, beggars, and orphans who lived in utter poverty; Jews, White Russians, and stateless refugees who lived not much better; and a few ultrawealthy who treated the city as their extraterritorial playground. Leftists organized in these intoxicating settings too. In 1921, a dozen intellectuals gathered in the French Concession to found the Chinese Communist Party.
After Shanghai survived Japan’s invasion and Mao’s rule, its star rose again through the 1980s. The central government displayed such brazen favoritism toward Shanghai that people waiting for a bus in other cities might call out, “Let comrades from Shanghai board first!” to prompt a burst of sour laughter around them. Today, Shanghai’s seedy past is out of view. But remnants of its colonial history are everywhere, only now with a refurbishing by consumer-friendly modernity. Neoclassical buildings made of elegant stone on the west bank of the Huangpu face off against Shanghai’s iconic skyscrapers on the other bank, which are once again Asia’s tallest buildings, only now encased in glass.
My home in Shanghai was in the former French Concession, which is still full of plane trees and cafés. I loved this area. A twenty-minute walk south of my home was a bakery started by a French émigré, which made apple strudels and baguettes. Twenty minutes north was one of the six Starbucks Roasteries in the world—a two-floor space with a half dozen serving stations—which the company advertises as a “theatrical shrine to coffee passion.” Walking twenty minutes east brought me to an attractive gray-brick museum that was the location of the first congress of the Communist Party. Surrounding it is a shopping complex featuring Lululemon, Carhartt, and Le Labo. If any of the summer tour groups found themselves too hot while queuing to enter the Communist Party museum, they could pop next door for a frozen custard at Shake Shack.
When I reminisce about Shanghai, I don’t just miss its splendid urban beauty. Nestled throughout these spaces are some of the most wonderful eateries in the world.
Though Sichuan food might be China’s most thrilling cuisine, I believe that Shanghai is home to its finest. This region was China’s richest and most fertile for centuries, developing sophisticated dishes. Breakfast might consist of a half dozen soup dumplings served in a bamboo steamer, meant to be dipped in a tray of vinegar with a few shreds of ginger. Shanghai noodles are drizzled in scallion oil and served with a slab of braised pork belly and a few pieces of kelp. Shanghai cuisine varies enormously by season, showcasing the bounty of the region. In the autumn, banquet tables are full of steamed mitten crabs, prized not only for their delicate flesh but even more for their bright orange roe, which are briny and have the chewy consistency of the steamed yolk of a duck egg. Spring is even better. Markets lay out a riotous mix of leafy greens, which the Shanghainese like to sauté with a splash of high-proof liquor. Bamboo shoots burst forth when the weather turns warm, and chefs throw them into soups or braises to bring out their sweet tenderness.
Shanghai was wonderful that spring. China’s zero-Covid strategy had broadly halted the transmission of the virus. By April 2020, just a few months after the Wuhan outbreak, while Americans were huddling indoors, I was going out again to restaurants and then to cinemas later that summer.* In 2020, when I asked my parents whether I should visit them in Pennsylvania, their reply was not very typical for Chinese: they demanded that I didn’t visit. Much better to stay in China, my mom told me, than Trump’s America. They were in good shape, and I was glad they didn’t need me there.
I didn’t dread the virus. I dreaded only the process of reentering China if I departed. One of the core tactics that China used to keep out the virus was to shuttle everyone flying to the country into government-designated quarantine hotels, in which a person would be unable to leave a small room for two or three weeks, depending on the jurisdiction.
So I spent my time inside China, doing things like riding my bike from Guiyang to Chongqing. In 2021, I read giant novels like Dickens’s Bleak House and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I also met my now-wife Silvia, a professor at the University of Michigan who was taking a sabbatical at NYU-Shanghai. As an ethnographer of technology cultures, Silvia had lived in China and continued to stay engaged. The United States that Silvia departed in 2021 was still a distressed place, where few people were getting together for in-person contact. She was even more thrilled than usual to be able to return to China for research when she obtained a rare visa. After completing her quarantine, Silvia felt a sense of freedom on Shanghai’s vibrant streets. We got to know each other as we cycled around the city to cafés and dumpling shops.
But things weren’t completely normal. To enter most public spaces—my office, a restaurant, even many outdoor commercial areas—I had to pull out my phone to display my contact-tracing QR code to the burly man guarding the entrance. Green meant normal, while yellow meant that I had had some degree of proximity to a positive case; one wouldn’t have needed to flash a red code, since the state would probably have hauled that person off to quarantine. The cell towers that triangulated a person’s location and the contact-tracing workforce sometimes produced errors. Merely walking by a restaurant with a known infection might turn your code yellow, even if you never went in. People often complained that no would explain why their code stopped being green. But quarantines and movement restrictions felt like inconveniences worth respecting. Having to fumble for my phone to pull up my contact-tracing app whenever I entered a public space didn’t feel like too big a deal when I looked at how other nations were suffering. China was piling on these controls gradually, so the incremental asks felt more acceptable.
But I was aware of the ground shifting under my feet. A big part of my work was to cover US–China relations, which had been unraveling even before the pandemic. Throughout 2020, President Trump lobbed shots at China’s tech companies, which I covered even while travel became more difficult. But what was happening inside China was even more unexpected. Xi Jinping grew bold as China controlled the virus and the rest of the world did not. While he announced a campaign to achieve “common prosperity,” he cracked down on digital platforms and real estate developers. My clients had a lot of questions for me since there were few people they could call who were in China. They asked me how it was possible that after the virus emerged in Wuhan, China seemed to be containing it better than anyone else. I answered them honestly: China was doing well—for now.
In December 2021, we began hearing about the omicron strain of the virus, which scientists told us was so much more transmissible than earlier variants. I wondered about omicron’s effect on China in my annual letter published on the last day of that year. “I worry that it’s so transmissible that the government will . . . implement lockdowns far more severe than anything it has done to this point.” On Twitter, I was more flip: “I prepared three items at home to survive a potentially severe lockdown: mooncakes (high-caloric and long-storing); a bike with a trainer (to cycle through the metaverse); and the Hebrew Bible (Robert Alter translation).”
Xi’an had already given us a preview of what it took to control a more transmissible strain of the virus. At the end of 2021, the northwestern city entered a lockdown. Residents ran out of food in the middle of winter, and horrific stories started to emerge. A woman who was eight months pregnant felt pains and wanted to be admitted to a hospital but was refused entry by staff until she took a PCR test—which could take several hours to process—and provide a negative result. Two hours later, she started bleeding heavily. She miscarried outside the hospital while pleading to be let in. Her story went viral until censors deleted it.
The pleasures of Shanghai curdled in the spring of 2022. Few people were able to buy seasonal greens or bamboo shoots. The central government had ordered a lockdown for the city of twenty-five million, who were mostly unable to step foot outside their residence for two months. For most of the pandemic, Shanghai distinguished itself by confronting the virus with a light touch. It might have counted as a triumph of the engineering state. Then Shanghai suffered what was probably the most ambitious quarantine that any state has ever attempted.
Omicron descended on Shanghai as spring commenced. At the start of March 2022, city officials announced that a quarantine hotel holding people flying in from overseas had bungled its safety protocols, leading to the infection of a few cleaning staff, who brought it into their communities. Shanghai implemented its now-familiar pandemic playbook: Authorities conducted mass tests, brought people who tested positive into a centralized quarantine facility (usually a sports stadium or convention center with thousands of beds), tracked the location history of each confirmed case, and imposed a lockdown on the neighborhoods where close contacts lived.
The premise of a lockdown was simple: nobody would be allowed to leave their apartments except to have their noses or throats swabbed in a government-administered PCR test. Nearly everyone in Shanghai lives in apartment compounds made up of several buildings with a courtyard below. The building I lived in was a smaller walk-up with six floors that held a couple dozen households. Most people, however, live in taller developments, which could each hold a few hundred households. High-rises might be more desirable in normal times, but I would soon find out how lucky I was to live in a walk-up. Huge developments were exponentially more likely to suffer a lockdown, as a single case could condemn the whole building.
Shanghai’s pandemic playbook had halted prior outbreaks. This time it failed. Throughout March, the number of new cases rose each day. Seven-foot-tall plastic barricades sprouted up around apartment compounds throughout the city, signifying a positive case. Restaurants, cafés, and other businesses shuttered. As commercial sounds dimmed, voices from loudspeakers became a constant presence. Several times, they summoned everyone in my compound to go to a nearby facility so that we could all be tested. I never tested positive, thankfully. Nobody I knew did either. If you were positive, the government would take you into a mass quarantine facility; if health authorities suspected you had the virus based on your location history, you might be prohibited from leaving home for a few days. Several of my friends were told they had to stay inside because they were proximate to someone who might have the virus.
By late March, a sense of dread pervaded Shanghai. On a particularly eerie day, Silvia and I heard from three separate friends within the span of an hour that they were no longer able to leave home for three days: A neighbor had been a close contact to a positive case. That morning, Silvia and I cycled to a café near the Embankment Building, an iconic art deco residence that once housed Jewish refugees. We remarked over some croissants that the city had never felt so quiet. As we cycled back home, we saw the Embankment Building transformed. Health workers and police officers had covered the exits and were helping each other put on all-white protective suits held together with blue tape. They looked like they were preparing to lay siege to the building. These workers, nicknamed dabai, or big whites, became dreaded specters that symbolized enforcement of zero-Covid.
In the government’s daily press conferences, Shanghai officials repeatedly denied that they would order a broad lockdown for the city. The situation was in hand, they told us, even though the number of new infections was increasing every day. “Shanghai Has No Plans for City Lockdown” read a headline on March 24 in the state-run China Daily newspaper. Shanghai is “too important to lock down,” claimed Wu Fan, one of the members of the city’s health commission, during a press conference on March 26. Then she added, with a shade of arrogance, “The city of Shanghai does not belong only to the people of Shanghai. It is a driving force for the global economy, and a lockdown here would shake the world.”
The day after Wu Fan’s defiant proclamation, Shanghai announced it would lock down. The announcement was ever so softly worded. Shanghai was enacting a “partial pause” to enter a “quiet period” that would last eight days. First the eastern half of the city would enter lockdown, then the western half. The city ordered people to work from home; all businesses would shut down. The bridges and tunnels connecting the two halves of the city (separated by the Huangpu River) were blocked. The government promised to deliver food and ensure medical access. All lockdown measures, they said, would terminate on April 5.
Shanghai’s lockdown extended far beyond that date. Case counts exploded while the city was in its quiet period. Instead of lasting eight days, the lockdown lasted eight weeks, finally reopening in June. I often think about the China Daily headline “Shanghai Has No Plans for City Lockdown.” It could be read in two ways. I first understood it as a denial that the city would impose a lockdown. I understand it now as a totally accurate explanation of what happened next: The city had made no plans for confining twenty-five million people to their homes for eight weeks.
Government drones descended throughout the city. Since the start of the pandemic, the state had dispatched megaphone-equipped drones to nag the uncompliant. A person walking without a mask might hear a whirring craft above his head, from which a distorted, barking voice would yell at him to mask up or return home. A Shanghai neighborhood official outlined what would happen if a drone came upon an illegal gathering of people: “The drone will try to dissuade,” in other words, berate them, “and ground forces will be linked in real time.”
An even more bewildering use of drones took place in the early days of the Shanghai lockdown. The city’s top mental health official introduced an unexpectedly sparky phrase in an otherwise drab press conference on the course of the virus, demanding that Shanghainese “repress your soul’s yearning for freedom.” Social media users immediately began to make fun of the phrase by putting it into memes. People weren’t used to poetry from bureaucrats. One night in April, as the lockdown swung into high gear, a drone carrying a megaphone began blasting that message into apartments full of huddling residents: “Repress your soul’s yearning for freedom,” with a woman’s voice played on loop while a light blinked from the drone. “Do not open your windows to sing, which can spread the virus.”
The phrase stopped being amusing.
Over April 2022, stress in Shanghai spiked to unimaginable levels.
The primary worry for most people was how to secure food when they could not leave their homes. The surprise lockdown announcement, coming in the evening, gave people in Pudong, in the eastern half of the city, only hours to stock up on food. Puxi, the more populous western half where I lived, had four more days to prepare. Many people had failed to stockpile essential goods, after repeated denials of lockdown by city officials diminished their sense of urgency. Even among people who were able to stock up, it was difficult to keep fruit and vegetables fresh after ten days or so.
The Shanghai government had promised to make food deliveries. It started out okay: Everyone I know in Shanghai received a handful of packages featuring a welcome but random assortment of fruits, vegetables, and meat. But government deliveries quickly ran out of steam. On April 5, when the lockdown was supposed to end, Shanghai announced that it would need to be extended. That’s when food concerns heightened. By mid-April, nearly all of my friends had experienced at least a few days of food insecurity. Two sets of parents told me that they forfeited their own meals to save food for their young children. When Emma, an American friend of mine, opened her government-organized food delivery, she discovered a freshly slaughtered chicken, still with a few feathers on it. She had no idea how to prepare it; she also had nothing else to eat. So she went to YouTube. After psyching herself up, she pulled up a video to learn how to gut a chicken, grimacing as she eviscerated it.
Without help from the government, people tried to place orders on grocery delivery platforms. They became immediately overwhelmed. The thing to do was to set a lot of alarms—6:00 a.m. for Meituan, 6:30 a.m. for DingDong, 7:00 a.m. for Freshippo, 8:00 a.m. for Yonghui—to place an order in the half minute before all the food was snapped up on these platforms. The food supply chain broke down for several reasons. One of them was that the state made it difficult for truckers to bring food into Shanghai, fearing that they could bring the virus across vast distances. To cross a province, truckers often had to wait in lines, remaining in their cabs until their Covid test results were available. One viral video showed a driver holding up bottles of his own excrement because traffic control would not permit him to exit. He exploded in frustration that the controls made him feel like an “animal in captivity.” These strictures drove many to quit. In mid-April, trucking activity in Shanghai was only 15 percent of its normal level.
Much of the food that made it into cities rotted before it could be delivered to residents. The responsibility for organizing food deliveries fell to Shanghai’s neighborhood committees, the lowest level of officialdom, which had been staffed mostly with elderly volunteers more used to propaganda work than the intensive engagement with Excel spreadsheets that the logistics of food parcels demanded. The state also immobilized normally robust food courier services. Delivery workers wearing mustard yellow or baby blue uniforms, carrying food inside a box strapped to the backs of their scooters, faced lockdowns too. A few made the choice to be homeless in order to continue work. At the cost of sleeping under bridges or in other public spaces, they were able to roam around the city, delivering food to earn higher commissions.
Shanghainese marveled that they could worry about hunger while they lived in China’s richest city in the year 2022. People muttered darkly that China had achieved “common prosperity,” Xi Jinping’s new signature initiative to reduce inequality, in China’s most capitalist city a decade ahead of schedule. Though some people connected to the government might have had better access to food, nearly everyone—rich and poor, young and old, local and foreign—was in the same hungry boat. Celebrities complained online that they had to spend nearly $300 to have some vegetables and eggs delivered. One of the country’s top venture capitalists, who was an investor in grocery delivery companies, sent a message on social media asking people how to get food.
After complaints about hunger grew louder, the Communist Party responded with a time-tested tactic: scapegoating. State media publicized a few cases in which food deliveries were hoarded by residents rather than being distributed to their neighbors. These cases might have been real, but they weren’t the main problem. The fundamental issue was that the surprise lockdown announcement had deeply broken Shanghai’s food supply chain, crippling both long-distance and local deliveries.
In the latter half of April, people found a lifeline. My friend Owen had moved to Shanghai from Beijing just a few months before the start of the lockdown. An American in his early thirties, Owen went to work at a policy research outfit in Beijing after graduating from college. He lived on his own in a modest walk-up, above a noodle shop, that looked out toward a small supermarket. Since Owen lived in Puxi, he had more time to stock up before he was locked down. The day after the announcement, he woke up early to go to the grocery store, finding a long line even before doors opened. He managed to snatch a few bags of fresh vegetables along with ground beef. These he cooked into a bolognese sauce, which he kept frozen in several parcels.
Shortly after the lockdown began, Owen received a generous bag of government-sent rations: peppers, tomatoes, bok choy, garlic, ginger, potatoes, and more. A smaller bag arrived the following week. Then nothing. For weeks, the government dropped off no new food. Owen began trying each day to book a grocery delivery but never succeeded. Everyone else in the city was trying to do the same, fighting for a small pool of available food. After a few days without success, he thought to himself, “This could be bad.”
Owen wrote his WeChat handle onto a slip of paper and taped it outside his door. WeChat is the universal chat app in China, and a typical person belongs to several dozen chat groups: family, colleagues, other school parents, board game enthusiasts, friends from college, any group with activities to coordinate. Since Owen lived on the lowest residential floor, just above the shops, everyone was able to see his WeChat handle when they passed by to take Covid tests. Soon enough, the whole building added him, and he formed a groupchat for its thirty-six households. Owen didn’t seek to be his building’s unofficial representative. As a tall dude with blue eyes who had just moved to Shanghai, he wasn’t the likeliest spokesperson for his all-Chinese building. “After my neighbors added me,” Owen told me, “their attitude was ‘what’s the plan, bro’?” He became the point person for communicating with authorities as well as the ringleader for organizing communal functions.
Neighbors were able to coordinate help for each other in this WeChat group, even elderly ones (though they might be digitally represented by a son or daughter who wasn’t living with them). The chat’s most important function was to arrange group buying, which Owen accomplished by placing bulk orders directly from a wholesaler. Somehow, food deliveries were possible that way. The system eased hunger through the latter half of April, though it still had a lot of problems. Bulk orders demanded averaging out food preferences; everyone wanted eggs, but not all foreigners could convince their Chinese neighbors that butter was necessary too. One day Owen found himself craving good bread, a luxury that his neighbors wouldn’t have agreed to. He bought some from a home baker across town, at $40 a loaf.
Once food arrived downstairs, a rotating cast of volunteers delivered it throughout the building. Some walk-ups agreed to prohibit, for example, the purchase of plastic jugs of water, since it was unfair for neighbors to lug them up flights of stairs. Owen only sometimes volunteered for these jobs, since he still had a day job to do at a public affairs company. My friends felt they had to do two full-time jobs: their regular one and the many hours a day spent trying to procure food necessities. Bulk orders weren’t possible for everyone. Smaller buildings didn’t have enough residents to place egg orders by the thousands. And the system disfavored the elderly, who struggled to navigate mobile purchases.
While Shanghai was in strict lockdown through April, the number of new infections kept rising. The lockdown extension surprised no one. Everyone knew that lockdowns wouldn’t end until numbers dropped to zero.
I asked Owen why so many people still caught the virus during lockdown. “It was for sure due to the tests,” he replied. People had to report for Covid testing nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. A medical team would enter an apartment compound and summon everyone downstairs, either on WeChat or with a bullhorn. Anyone who didn’t come down would receive a buzz on the downstairs gate; if that didn’t work, they would hear a knock on their door. It was absurd that elderly people—some of whom rarely left their apartments without a pandemic—were squeezed into elevators with neighbors.
It’s impossible for anyone to be certain how exactly they caught the virus. Perhaps omicron was so transmissible that people caught it through the plumbing or ventilation systems that connect people in Shanghai’s apartments. Perhaps it spread through food deliveries. Most people believe they caught it through the daily testing regime: from a neighbor while they were waiting in line. Every so often, a story popped up that the medical worker swabbing everyone’s throats had the virus himself, which at least contaminated your sample and perhaps infected you. Despite exacting measures, the number of new confirmed cases kept rising for four weeks until the end of the lockdown.
Many people feared the virus itself: For two years, the Chinese government did everything it could to frighten people about getting Covid. Censors stepped in to make sure that no one called it “just a cold.” If one tested positive for the virus, life became a lot more complicated. The Chinese government did not permit people who tested positive to stay in their homes. Since the early days of the Wuhan outbreak in 2020, authorities realized that someone who had the virus inevitably gave it to their entire household and perhaps the entire building. Health authorities came to take the infected away to one of the huge, centralized quarantine facilities. It wasn’t fun to be in these places. A producer from CNN who tested positive for the virus described the unpleasantness of living in Shanghai’s largest convention center, which hosted fifty thousand beds. She described lights that never turned off, loudspeakers demanding that everyone show up for PCR tests at 6:00 a.m., and everywhere the stench of toilets or unwashed laundry.
After taking the infected to quarantine facilities, health authorities entered people’s homes to sanitize them. That meant dousing everything in disinfectant—furniture, books, electronics, clothing, the piano. Pet owners faced a particular dilemma. They might ask a neighbor to look after a cat or dog while they were away in quarantine. Those who couldn’t find help decided, painfully, to release their pet into the streets and hope for the best. It was that or leave it indoors, somehow providing enough food to sustain it through the uncertain length of the owner’s quarantine period. A viral video of a dabai chasing down a corgi with a shovel, striking it until it lay prone, did not make the decision any easier.
Parents of young children were even more frightened. Shanghai practiced a policy of separating babies and infants from parents, even if both tested positive. Photos spread of infants crying as they were held in metal cribs, while panicked parents told media that they hadn’t received updates from hospital staff on the status of their children for days. One woman told a reporter that the virus no longer frightens her. “Separation from my loved ones scares me more than anything else.” After an outcry online, the city dropped its policy of isolating children.
One day, Owen felt a slight pain below his abdomen. When he looked down, he saw a bump the size of a small fist between his right thigh and his groin. Googling suggested that it was a hernia: Part of Owen’s small intestine popped out and couldn’t be tucked back in. It’s not an uncommon problem for men, though usually not until they’re older. The good thing was that the bump didn’t cause too much pain. He’s still unsure how it developed. Possibly, he told me, from a strong sneeze, compounded by all the stress while being overwhelmingly sedentary.
Owen decided not to seek medical attention. It was nearly impossible to get to a hospital. One of the stories that provoked wide outrage was the case of an asthmatic forty-nine-year-old nurse in Shanghai, who was denied treatment at the hospital where she worked before she collapsed and died. People with health conditions were gripped by fear that their medications would run out: Attempting to procure them might have constituted yet another full-time job. One of my colleagues told me that her uncle with diabetes died during Shanghai’s lockdown because he could not access dialysis treatment. People marveled that hospitals more or less ignored every medical condition aside from Covid infections.
There was no universal experience of the Shanghai lockdown. The city of twenty-five million people dealt with situations ranging from the nightmarish to the merely difficult. Not everyone experienced hunger: Certain compounds found fairly regular access to food, especially if a government official lived in the building. Introverts found ways to create structure in their lives. After the lockdown, people got to know the neighbors they had previously interacted with only on WeChat. Even for those who found it all bearable, the challenge was that no one knew how long the lockdown might last. Neighborhood officials grew uncommunicative, mostly because they had little idea of when the lockdown would end. Perhaps the most unnerving features of the pandemic were the frequently changing government policies. People had little idea when they would be able to go outside for anything other than lining up for a Covid test, while they spent exorbitantly on food chosen by their neighbors and tried to stay sane and healthy.
For many, there was nothing to do but stay glued to their phones all day, idly scrolling through entertainment or frantically attempting to secure a grocery delivery. Or they spent time on social media. A lot of what we know from Shanghai’s lockdown comes from the videos shared on WeChat, Weibo, and other platforms.
The bulk of Shanghai’s population experienced at least a few moments of immense frustration. Banging pots and pans during the night became a much-shared form of protest. A few videos portrayed whole buildings of people engaging in cathartic screaming (which might explain why the government sent drones instructing people to stop “singing”). Someone shot a video of a woman wandering stark naked around her courtyard. Many videos purported to show the aftermath of people who committed suicide by leaping from their high-rise to the ground below. People shared videos of others screaming denunciations of the police or the regime. A couple who had tested negative for the virus filmed themselves confronting a police officer who insisted on taking them to a quarantine facility. When they showed him their negative test results, he replied, “You are positive if I say you’re positive.”
China’s already formidable censorship regime distinguished itself in this crisis, meeting the challenge with a staggering response. Complaints and protest videos were deleted quickly after they went viral. When Shanghai residents posted en masse the first line of China’s national anthem, “Arise, you who refuse to be slaves,” their posts were removed. Censors took down posts spreading a National People’s Congress spokesperson’s remark that quarantines may be unlawful. At one point, social media platforms blocked the word “Shanghai” from search results.
One video managed to achieve censorship escape velocity. Someone (or a group of people) collated a chronological montage of audio clips into a video titled “Voices of April.” The six-minute clip included Wu Fan’s remark that Shanghai was too important to lock down; shouts of people demanding food; a man pleading for his sick father to have medical treatment; exhausted officials saying there was nothing they could do. “Voices of April” dominated my WeChat feed for a few days. People put more effort into sharing that video than anything else in an attempt to circumvent censorship. They even put it on the blockchain, where it will remain for posterity.
By late April, most of my foreign friends—especially those with children—departed China, a few for good. Pricey plane tickets were the least of their concerns. To depart from their apartments and get to the airport, people had to sign affidavits swearing not to return to their residence. A taxi to the airport that costs $30 in normal times shot up to $300 because only a few cars and buses were permitted to pick up passengers.
The number of new infections in Shanghai peaked in late April. Food logistics improved through May, such that Morgan Stanley was able to do what an American bank does: deliver extravagant gifts to select clients. One of my friends received such a package and told me that it included a crayfish salad, which felt like an absurd luxury at that moment. On June 1, the government gingerly allowed the city to return to normal.
Shanghai’s lockdown was one of the major turns in the dramatic arc of China’s pandemic experience. Over the three years of the pandemic, the emotional lives of people across the country veered from fury to pride to desperation.
The first act took place over the early days of 2020. I was living in Beijing and watched as the city descended into anxiety as we heard about the coronavirus that emerged from Wuhan. By the start of February, Beijing’s streets were empty while Wuhan’s were positively grim. We were galled by the death of Li Wenliang, a doctor in Wuhan who faced police reprimands when he attempted to warn people of a new respiratory virus. On February 7, he died from the coronavirus that he attempted to warn people about. That night, my WeChat feed was dominated by tributes to Doctor Li, accompanied by immense fury at how the police had treated him. I wouldn’t see my WeChat feed be so dominated by a single event until “Voices of April” two years later.
Officials in Wuhan suppressed news about the new virus circulating in their city for the most picayune of reasons: They wanted to ensure the smooth operation of an annual political meeting. In those crucial early days of the pandemic, they wanted to hear no news that anything was amiss, especially not since the Lunar New Year was about to begin. Wuhan officials refused to call off a community feast that attracted a hundred thousand people only six miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market, where the coronavirus was already circulating. At the Lunar New Year gala, state media praised performers for helping the show go on even while they were sick.
Beijing felt grayer and colder in February 2020. Nearly all restaurants and public spaces were closed. My friends and I went out on bike rides across mostly empty streets. Meanwhile, frightening images were spilling out of Wuhan. The official narrative I heard in Beijing was of heroic sacrifice. Some of the images that state media released were inspiring: Authorities livestreamed a dozen excavators that built a new hospital in eleven days. But videos of nurses crying while having their heads shaved (to prevent virus transmission) did not make good propaganda. The unofficial narratives were far more heartbreaking. One forty-two-year-old woman living not far from Beijing produced one-line snapshots of personal stories that she posted on social media:
The one following a hearse in the deep of night, calling out “Mama” in grief.
The 12-year-old who went alone to report their orphan status after their entire family died.
The one who was forced to write “You must wear a mask when you leave the house” 100 times by the local police.
The one who carried their mother on their back while searching everywhere for treatment, walking for three hours.
The one who recovered from a severe case only to come home to find their entire family dead, who hung themselves from the roof.
Then she stopped posting. Police in her hometown published a notice a few months later that she was guilty of spreading rumors and sentenced her to six months in jail.
Xi Jinping declared controlling the coronavirus to be a people’s war, a Maoist term that promised to smash imperialist invaders with guerrilla maneuvers. The state marshaled hefty men, dabai, dressing them in ill-fitting white uniforms and arming them with temperature scanners to check whether people entering buildings had a fever. Crimson propaganda banners that previously declared the superiority of socialism were replaced by ones urging people to stay indoors. The government pulled out all the stops to prevent people from traveling across the country. It halted train services, preventing the millions of migrant workers who traveled home to celebrate Lunar New Year from returning to their workplace. And it blocked nearly all international flights. The trickle of people entering the country were mostly Chinese nationals who could accept living for up to three weeks in quarantine hotels.
I felt baffled and angry that winter. Covid-19 was China’s third epidemic in three decades, exploding in exactly the same pattern as the previous two. In the 1990s, Henan province suffered an AIDS outbreak after blood banks reused needles and commingled diseased blood with healthy blood; the government spent years silencing whistleblowers in this slower-moving epidemic before finally confronting the problem. In 2003, officials in Beijing and Guangdong attempted to suppress news of the SARS outbreak before moving decisively to control it.
A year before the coronavirus spread from Wuhan, China’s top disease control official, George Gao, offered a boast: “I am very confident to say that SARS-like outbreaks will not occur again because the infectious disease surveillance system network of our country is well established.” Gao had it right when he said that China had developed a technically impressive disease surveillance system. What he failed to factor in were the weaknesses in China’s political system, in which local officials prevented health workers from reporting the disease. Rather, Wuhan officials directed police to punish medical whistleblowers. And so China faced its worst public health crisis yet.
The second act of the pandemic began in March 2020. The authoritarian impulse to suppress bad news produced a catastrophe; then the restrictions that the state imposed on daily life beat back the virus. While life was starting to return to normal for those of us in Beijing, Covid-19 had slammed into the rest of the world. And though none of us forgot our anger with how it all started, people inside China watched as much wealthier governments bungled their own pandemic response. Local officials in Wuhan and Hubei province weren’t the only ones who denied the seriousness of the virus; few global leaders took it seriously. While the engineering state activated every sinew of its powers to break the transmission of the virus, most other governments were treating Covid almost as if it were a curiosity that could affect only Chinese people.
In my professional life, I was puzzled that even financial markets barely reacted to major lockdowns in China. In February, I went on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, talking with cohosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal, as we all felt a bit bewildered that the market didn’t want to price in a global pandemic. Either these hyperrational people thought that Beijing’s measures were effective enough to stomp out the virus or that it couldn’t really affect the rest of the world. Reality settled in shortly afterward.
The fierce anger that the Chinese people felt at the cover-up in Wuhan partly transfigured into a sense of pride at the pandemic control efforts conducted by the central government. Chinese saw how Italy, Russia, and the United States mishandled their pandemic response. They gawked at clips of Donald Trump speculating that the virus would disappear on its own or that it could be tackled by injecting disinfectants into people. When Li Wenliang died, foreign commentators bandied about the term “Chernobyl moment” to describe the greatest threat to the Communist Party’s legitimacy in decades. Three months later, Xi declared that China had “turned the tide on the virus.” Subsequently, while the miseries of Covid deepened in other countries, People’s Daily declared that pandemic controls were a demonstration of the superiority of China’s socialist political system.
China’s pandemic control measures were not unique. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan also imposed lockdowns, practiced centralized quarantines, forced international travelers into quarantine hotels, and demanded everyone display health tracking apps. But China enforced these controls more diligently, on far more people, because it is an engineering state.
Only a country ruled by engineers could be so single-minded about pursuing a number. Since the early days of the pandemic, Chinese officials became obsessed with two numbers: new infections and the reproductive rate of the virus. The engineering state did everything it could to stomp them down. It led, ultimately, to the pursuit of zero-Covid (formally known as dynamic zero clearing in Chinese). Just as with the one-child policy, the target could not be clearer: The number was in the name. And just as with the one-child policy, zero-Covid was suffused with military language: China was fighting a people’s war against the virus, and cities like Wuhan and Shanghai were battlegrounds that had to be won.
No policy was too senseless to pursue after Xi Jinping staked the prestige of the Communist Party on control of the virus. “Prevention and control work cannot be relaxed,” Xi repeatedly instructed local officials. The costs of zero-Covid seemed worth it for a while. Only later did the increasingly severe movement controls and state disregard for any medical condition except Covid turn the strategy into a farce. Officials brought a literal-mindedness to enforcing zero-Covid that created situations best described as whimsical. The coastal city of Xiamen swabbed the mouths of fresh-caught fish to test for Covid. A panda research base in Chengdu tested every animal in its facility. Medical workers chased down Tibetan and Mongolian herdsmen—who probably saw nothing but yaks for days on grassland steppes—to swab their mouths.
Throughout the three years of the pandemic, China developed a weightier state apparatus, one better able to impress itself upon its subjects using digital surveillance. Enforcement of the one-child policy was an intensely physical act, in which health workers got up close and personal with vulnerable women. To achieve zero-Covid, the state once more mobilized millions of people: a mostly male workforce that donned white protective gear to become dabai, or the public enforcers of pandemic control, and a mostly female workforce that worked as contact tracers to investigate people’s travel histories between and within cities.
Digital technologies gave the engineering state a tool it did not have when enforcing the one-child policy. Implementing zero-Covid was a technologically intensive affair that used mobile networks to track people’s movements, sometimes aided by facial recognition technologies and other forms of digital surveillance enabled by the mobile devices that nearly everyone carried.
Sometimes, China’s digital platforms introduced helpful interfaces, for example, when mapping services made it easier for people to find fever clinics nearby. Sometimes, they were enlisted to control the movements of people. To access the showers at Shanghai University, students had to display a code on their phones, which was green for five and a half hours every two days. A sociology student marveled at her experience to a Shanghai newspaper: “It’s such a strange feeling: the idea that all our daily activities—what we eat, or when we can take a shower—are included in the authorities’ plan.” The state attempted to reduce movement throughout society. Since Chinese university campuses were already self-enclosed areas, often far from urban zones—and since college students are meant to spend all their time studying anyway—officials simply decided to lock them in. During lockdowns, students struggled to stay sane in their dorm rooms, which might have four people bunking together.
Factory workers were sometimes enclosed within a “bubble.” That was Beijing’s invention for the 2022 Winter Olympics, in which foreign athletes were physically separated from the rest of the population. Companies attempted to create bubbles by enticing workers never to leave the factory—sleeping by the assembly lines—for perhaps quadruple their usual pay. Volkswagen and Foxconn, for example, adopted these bubbles to keep the assembly lines for their cars and iPhones flowing. The problem was that even the most persevering workers grew tired of living at the assembly line after a few weeks. And as often as not, the virus would still penetrate the bubble, infecting everyone.
Public spaces sometimes suffered a surprise lockdown. On more than one occasion, visitors to Shanghai Disneyland were told that they could no longer depart from the happiest place on earth because a close contact of a confirmed case had passed through it. Thirty thousand visitors were trapped inside the park for much of a day in 2022, departing only after they all tested negative for the virus. There didn’t seem to be too much grumbling since Disneyland continued to operate its rides. Better there than at Shanghai’s Jiuting Bridge Wholesale Market or the Songjiang Building Supplies Market, both of which kept more than a thousand people locked up for days without providing water or food. Throughout the latter phases of zero-Covid, panicked white-collar workers streamed out of office buildings in Shanghai or Shenzhen when there was a rumor that a building might be placed under lockdown. It’s not clear what was more frightening: being trapped with coworkers or not being able to shower.
Big cities attempted to enforce lockdowns on targeted spaces, like a particular apartment or office building. Covid lockdowns were far more indiscriminate elsewhere, for an entire city might be locked down over the discovery of a handful of cases. Smaller cities had little confidence that the medical infrastructure could handle a surge of infections, so local officials were quicker to order disruptive lockdowns. The people who lived in China’s border cities (next to Myanmar and Laos in the south, or Russia and North Korea in the north) were subject to the most frequent lockdowns of all, since people traveled through sometimes porous national borders.
Many people made their peace with these practices because they listened to health authorities who said that it was better than infections and deaths; because the state piled the regulations on gradually, improvising as it went along; or because they had no other choice. By the time that Xi’an and Shanghai’s lockdowns came into view, however, more people questioned whether food insecurity and indefinite confinement made the pursuit of zero-Covid still worthwhile.
The first act of zero-Covid was characterized by fury, the second act by pride mixed in with some degree of exhaustion. The third act, which began after Shanghai’s lockdown, led to desperation and, later, broad protests.
An hour after Shanghai’s surprise lockdown announcement, Silvia and I purchased airline tickets to Yunnan, the mountainous province in China’s southwest where my family is from.
Neither of us trusted that the Shanghai lockdown would last only eight days. More important, both of us were able to work remotely. We had been discussing whether to depart from Shanghai since the eerie day we saw the dabai besiege the Embankment Building. The lockdown announcement was a good prompt for organizing our departure. When Silvia and I left, our flight was one of a dozen that hadn’t been canceled that day. We were lucky. Cities across China had already refused to allow flights from Shanghai because it was the center of the omicron outbreak.
A trip we thought would take two weeks turned into something that lasted nearly half a year. Yunnan is a good place for reflection because it is plausibly China’s freest province. In the mountains of Yunnan, I glimpsed the idea of not only the engineering state but also the lawyerly society. Several questions ran through my mind while I was unable to return to Shanghai: How was China able to enforce lockdowns of this scale? Why have people been able to accept it? And when will Xi finally give up these controls?
Yunnan is even more mountainous than neighboring Guizhou, and still less touched by the industrial transformation of China’s prosperous coastal zones. It remains one of China’s poorer regions, its economy sustained by tourism and resource extraction, particularly minerals and tobacco. The northernmost part of Yunnan is historic Tibet, home to a chunk of the Himalayas—including Kawa Karpo, one of the most sacred mountains in Tibetan Buddhism. Shangri-La is the largest city in the region. The small roads around Tibetan monasteries are strewn with prayer flags and studded with impassive yaks. In Yunnan’s south, where I flew from Shanghai, the mountains are greener and gentler. Tea hills and rubber plantations rise above the Mekong River, carrying snowmelt from Tibetan highlands that eventually drains beyond southern Vietnam. Xishuangbanna is one of China’s most biodiverse regions, home to many trees and plants, wild elephants, peafowl, bears, and birds galore.
Around half of China’s officially recognized minority groups have their homes in Yunnan. They live between its snowy mountains, rainforests, rice terraces, and fast-moving rivers. Many of them have historically resisted rule by the dominant Han. It is part of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia that various scholars have labeled Zomia, which holds innumerable hill peoples who have developed state-repellent practices. James C. Scott has written most elegantly about how people in Zomia have become “barbarians by design,” who cultivate shifting root crops (which are less assessable by tax collectors) and maintain an oral culture (which makes their histories and ethnic identities more malleable). It is not surprising that people in these hills claim various liberties, like foraging wild mushrooms, hunting game, or trafficking harder drugs. Not even the Han-Chinese state has been able to assert jurisdiction over the dense jungles and rugged mountains of the region.
Silvia and I spent several months in the city of Dali, which has a lake on one side and a mountain range on the other. The local Bai people built lovely lakeside houses, made of white walls ornamented with wooden carvings and blue ink paintings. The Bai are mountain farmers who have a long culture of craftmaking, producing marbleware or indigo linens for trade with the Han. Up until the 2000s, a different Bai product attracted foreign travelers: cannabis, which grew freely in the region. Foreigners in Beijing or Shanghai may still reminisce about the good old days in Dali, where one could be beckoned by a smiling older lady into an alley to purchase a baggie.
With its lake, nature, and sunny weather, the city has gained the nickname of Dalifornia. While I continued my work remotely, Silvia was doing ethnographic fieldwork. She introduced me to some of the young people there, who were exploring their interests in agriculture or virtual technologies. The city has attracted an odd mix of people: China’s burgeoning organic movement, which is mostly made up of younger people who want to take advantage of Dali’s fertile soils; moms who bring their kids to experience nature-focused educational programs as a break from the hypercompetitive schools in Shanghai and Shenzhen; and foreigners who came for the cannabis and stayed for the slower pace of life, opening sourdough bakeries, cafés, and techno clubs. Nowadays young Chinese and foreigners go to Dali not for cannabis but for more thrilling drugs: cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other Web3 paraphernalia.
A great deal of China’s crypto community has relocated to Dalifornia, drawn as much by the beautiful natural setting as the permissive environment. Mountains have beckoned, as Scott has written, to dissenters, rebels, and subversive types. It is not only the air that thins out at higher altitudes: The tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people tired of tax administration or the other ills of governed life have climbed upward. As a consequence, mountain dwellers tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans, Highland Scots, or various ethnic groups in Yunnan and other parts of Zomia. What is a difficulty for government administration and industrial growth is often a positive for personal liberties. The mountains of Yunnan protected local peoples from the state-produced famines in the Great Leap Forward and the harangues of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
That’s why Yunnan might be China’s freest region. It is farther from the country’s core, and unlike in Xinjiang or Tibet, the state hasn’t treated its ethnic populations to its most stringent controls. Yunnan can be a hub for drug trafficking, cryptocurrency gatherings, or the most radical activity in recent years: lax Covid enforcement. Local governments closed a market here or there throughout the years of zero-Covid but didn’t bother to enforce the serious lockdowns that affected Wuhan, Xi’an, and Shanghai. Too few people lived in enclosed apartment compounds for that to work. If authorities squeezed too tightly, people in Bai villages might have simply walked from their backyards into the mountains.
I picked up the idea of the engineering state in Yunnan’s mountains. The government was able to treat people as chess pieces to move around (or hold still) in Shanghai, while failing to do so in more remote areas. A glimmer of the lawyerly society came into view as well. One of the most-shared essays during the lockdown was a commentary by Tong Zhiwei, a constitutional law professor in Shanghai, who pointed out that the city’s lockdowns had no legal basis. The government’s response to Tong’s legal arguments was to censor his essay and erase his social media profile. What did it matter that keeping twenty-five million people indoors over an undefined period lacked legal authority? Good luck to anyone attempting to go to a courthouse to file a suit.
It is a little bit difficult to praise the US response to Covid. In retrospect, the whole thing looks shambolic, with different states having different policies, mostly made worse under Donald Trump’s chaotic management. Americans stumbled into learning to live with the virus in large part because of the ineffectualness of the government. But the United States (under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed) produced mRNA vaccines that China could not. And in retrospect, China’s response to Covid looks shambolic as well. The engineering state tried as hard as it could to hold on to earlier triumphs, until it was forced to let everything go.
After the Shanghai lockdown, it grew increasingly apparent that there was no industry that Xi would hesitate to crush and no personal misery worth noticing by the state if it could halt the spread of omicron. It didn’t matter that companies were feeling deeply uncertain about future investments, that local governments were running out of funds as they spent everything on testing, and that people were deeply exhausted. When the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote in 2020 that his country’s pandemic control measures resembled a “sanitation terror” and a “juridical-religious obligation that must be fulfilled at any cost,” he was criticized. His remark, in my view, applies in far stronger force to the engineering state’s commitment to zero-Covid. Chinese people grew livid that the medical system was prepared to ignore any number of deaths from diabetes, cancer, and other life-threatening conditions and that their entire lives had to be subordinated to the targeting of this number.
Hill peoples in Yunnan and other parts of Zomia have mounted occasional insurrections against various state controls. So I found myself wondering why more people did not attempt to protest Shanghai’s lockdown. The United States’ patchy lockdowns, mild even by the standards of European countries, produced mass unrest in the summer of 2020. Occasional scuffles had broken out between angry Shanghainese and police, but there was no broad rebellion. Though China’s domestic security budget is larger than the budget for its military, the state never even had to uncoil its more fearsome elements like the People’s Armed Police to enforce lockdowns. Regular police were all it needed.
A Shanghainese friend helped me appreciate the subtlety of police tactics. He lived in a compound in the French Concession with a lot of foreign residents, becoming, like Owen, one of the unofficial representatives of his building. One day during the lockdown, several of his neighbors acted out their frustrations by toppling a barricade. Afterward, police went through their surveillance videos, identified every perpetrator, and brought them into the station for interrogations that lasted hours. My friend told me that the police rarely asked open-ended questions, saying rather, “Confirm that you kicked the barricade so-and-so many times,” and then writing up their statements and demanding their signature. They didn’t impose any punishments. But these statements hung over the residents. A freaked-out French couple who signed statements subsequently departed the country for good.
I’ve asked several friends why they thought Shanghainese did not protest. They wondered that too. The main reason they proposed was that most Chinese were genuinely fearful of catching the virus. They had listened to too many government reports of how virulent it was and few reports from Western commentators that downplayed its seriousness. China’s health authorities had adopted a gradualist approach to layering on its measures, such that the zero-Covid strategy did not feel so strange until later. And no one imagined that the lockdown would last as long as it did. People might have protested earlier if they knew that the lockdown would last eight weeks, but the city’s initial announcement of an eight-day “pause” forestalled dramatic action.
But Shanghai was tense after the vividness of an eight-week lockdown. Nobody knew how Xi planned to exit from zero-Covid: Wasn’t everyone going to catch the virus anyway, potentially meeting it with a domestic vaccine that was less efficacious than what the American government was giving out? Shanghai tightened control over movement restrictions after it reopened in June, announcing that such measures were necessary to prevent another lockdown. For a while, people continued to accept them.
I was just impatient. There would be protests throughout the country in the fall of 2022. In Shanghai, they turned intensely political. I’ll never forget that I witnessed open antigovernment demonstrations in China’s richest and most populous city.
Silvia and I departed from Yunnan at the end of the summer. We returned to a Shanghai tense from the fresh trauma of lockdown.
The city’s restrictions were more consistently enforced than before. I couldn’t enter a public space—the subway, a restaurant, a convenience store—without displaying my health code showing a negative PCR test taken in the past seventy-two hours. The city put up kiosks on many street corners, but it was easy to forget to take a Covid test in time, making it no longer possible to meet one’s friend at a restaurant or café. One day, I had a lapse. When I stood on a sidewalk trying to order a coffee from a window counter, I faced the absurdity of being refused. The barista shrugged and turned away when I showed my anger.
In part due to tougher measures, Shanghai did not see rising caseloads through the fall. Omicron, however, was spreading through other cities across the country.
An earthquake struck Sichuan in September 2022. When panicked residents in the city of Chengdu hastened to exit their homes, pandemic control officers barred some people from leaving, locking them inside trembling buildings. A bus carrying people to quarantine facilities overturned on hilly terrain in Guizhou, killing twenty-seven people. A fire broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where ten people died after fire trucks were obstructed by pandemic-control barricades such that they couldn’t direct water on the blaze. All these were extensively reported in Chinese media. So was the 2022 FIFA World Cup, where millions of soccer-loving Chinese watched crowds of people cheer inside Doha’s stadiums. Two years ago, they’d scorned how the rest of the world handled the virus. Now Chinese watched with envy and wondered, was Covid really more dangerous than fires and earthquakes?
Xi Jinping wanted nothing to go wrong in 2022. At the party congress that October, he was about to appoint himself to a third term. It would have disrupted his political plans to let Covid break loose in China, triggering the sort of unrest that frightened the leadership at any time, but especially before the party congress that takes place once every five years. Xi grew obsessed with creating a stable political environment.
In May 2022, still in the middle of Shanghai’s lockdown, the Politburo announced that China’s zero-Covid policy “can stand the test of history. . . . Just as we have won the great battle for the defense of Wuhan, so too can we triumph in Shanghai.” The statement carried a sting for any doubters, promising to “fight against any speech that distorts, questions, or rejects our Covid-control policy.” In September, the Internet Monitoring Bureau of the Public Security Ministry issued a directive for propaganda authorities to broadcast only approved messages and to “stop spreading negative energy!”
By the end of October, as China’s largest cities escalated their pandemic controls, Xi secured his third term. But after more than two years of tightening controls and of tragedy, people were enraged.
Protests broke out and turned violent at Foxconn factories in Henan. Electronics assembly is exhausting and repetitive at the best of times; for thousands of assembly-line workers making iPhones, the stress became too much. It’s not clear what exactly prompted the unrest—missed payments, factory bubbles, or the spread of the virus—but it brought young men onto the streets. Videos showed workers facing off against massed riot police, some of them in their dabai suits, throwing bricks, fence segments, and stones into the masses of white uniforms. And the police were retreating.
Protests turned political elsewhere. One man in Chongqing went viral for shouting the American Revolutionary slogan “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Onlookers initially protected him from the police, but authorities eventually managed to shove him in a car. In the bar district of the French Concession, people chanted something far more threatening to the regime. One day in November, people held a vigil on Urumqi Road, the center of Shanghai’s bar district where many foreigners live. The road just happened to be named for the city where ten people died in a blaze. It wasn’t meant to be a big event. But it gained energy when tipsy young people staggered out of their cocktail bars and joined the commemorations.
At some point after midnight, the initially subdued vigil turned into a protest. Young people began yelling out their frustrations, surrounded by police, though they did nothing to stop their chants: “Down with the Communist Party! Xi Jinping step down!”
It was an impromptu protest, taking place precisely because it was never organized. I had already gone to sleep that night. The next day, I walked twenty minutes west of my home to Urumqi Road. There I found a substantial police presence with a lot of people milling around. I ran, coincidentally, into my friend Owen. The air thrummed with nervousness and excitement. When a car passed by, blasting the Chinese national anthem at high volume, we all perked up to see if the police would do something. We saw one police officer drag away a reporter from the BBC. In the evening, police moved decisively to clear people away from Urumqi Road. We saw them slowly disperse people from the zone, until they put up high barricades throughout the whole street, blocking most sidewalks.
Then there was a more individual protest. One morning, a man disguised as a construction worker draped two banners on a busy highway bridge in Beijing. He then burned a tire to create smoke and draw attention to his words. The first banner, loosely translated, read:
End the tests, we have to eat;
Stop with curfew, we want to be free;
Enough with lies, we demand dignity;
Reject the Cultural Revolution,
Reform and Opening is the solution;
We don’t need a great leader, but a free election;
We are citizens, not slaves.
The second banner read, “Remove the national traitor Xi Jinping.”
Police arrived to arrest him and take down the banners but not before these slogans started spreading on social media. The protester’s identity remains unconfirmed. What’s certain is that he’s paying a grievous price for hanging the banners. Censors have struck the highway bridge from China’s mapping services. If you put in “Sitong Bridge,” the service says that there is no result.
Some of the youth protesters suffered too. Young people gathered in Shanghai, Beijing, and a few other cities at the end of November, sometimes holding up a blank piece of A4-sized printer paper. Carrying blank pieces of paper became a way to symbolize China’s censorship. It was a perfect echo: Whiteness represented the enforcement of pandemic controls, through the protective medical suits of massed groups of dabai (big whites), until young people appropriated it for protest. Later, anti-Covid demonstrations in China were collectively known as “the white paper protests.”
Youth chanting, hanging slogans, holding blank pieces of paper—these would be paltry acts of protest in any democratic country. But it’s hard to overstate how rare it is to see public acts of defiance in China, especially after Xi dedicated immense resources for surveillance and enforcement to smother exactly this sort of demonstration. I certainly would never have expected to hear shouts of “Down with the Communist Party, Xi Jinping step down!” in Shanghai while police haplessly stood by. Even if these are fairly small acts, Beijing’s bridge man and the young people in Shanghai deserve to be remembered for their courage.
The number of protesters was never very large. They were special because they involved upper-class Chinese families: wealthy people who didn’t want to suffer lockdown and well-off youths who attended good schools. The Communist Party had always counted on these people for their support. The denouement of China’s Covid experience features broad exhaustion.
Throughout November 2022, while these protests took place, the virus was spinning out of control. Crucially, it wasn’t under control in Beijing. As the city moved to lock down, it encountered more resistance among residents. Beijing residents are proud of their heritage of challenging power, and many people were nervous about meeting the same fate that Shanghainese suffered in the spring.
The government’s response grew erratic. While top officials in Beijing were insisting that pandemic controls must continue, local cities around the country barely enforced any controls. By the start of December, the state had announced several rounds of “optimization” measures, the last of which abandoned the language of dynamic zero clearing. Nearly three years after it began, zero-Covid was over.
I caught Covid in Shanghai on December 23. It was a mild case, and many other people were less fortunate. The timing was nonsensical: The state had dropped all restrictions during the worst of winter. China hadn’t meaningfully accelerated its vaccinations of the population beforehand; it remains mystifying why they didn’t give people shots in any of the dozens of times it forced people to take PCR tests. Doctors and nurses received no special warning that zero-Covid would end abruptly, leaving them to face a surge of patients.
When I think back to this moment, it’s the lack of fever medications that really sticks with me. For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand. As best as I can tell, China is the only country that denied its people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic. It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic.
Propaganda authorities had no special warning, though they shifted seamlessly from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to saying that everyone had to be responsible for their own health the next. It felt like living through the scene in Orwell’s 1984, in which officials switched directions, mid-speech, declaring that Oceania was at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia.
Why did Xi suddenly abandon zero-Covid? I don’t think that the protests played the biggest role. Far more important was that people throughout the country had grown exhausted by lockdowns, which robbed them of their sanity and livelihoods. Local governments were just as exhausted, with many of them facing financial stress from doing so much testing while forgoing economic activity. (Economists from Nomura estimated that testing cost 1.8 percent of China’s GDP in 2022.) When the virus became entrenched in Beijing, I suspect that the central government took a good, hard look at whether it could enforce a lockdown on the capital, which has always enjoyed the greatest political pampering. Local jurisdictions around the country were already abandoning their own controls. Beijing decided that pandemic controls were no longer tenable. And so the virus came.
Xi Jinping didn’t make many public appearances between December and January. He never stepped out to explain the reversal of a policy he personally and forcefully insisted on, nor did he attempt to offer much comfort to people who faced an illness that his state spent three years terrifying people about. Crematoriums were operating nonstop from the end of December 2022, though the state failed to announce that many people had died from Covid. It was interesting that the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a burst of obituaries in December 2022 for the senior scholars who had just passed away.
In January, the state mouthpiece Xinhua released a commentary attempting to rebut that the move from zero-Covid to total-Covid was haphazardly planned. Rather, the news agency stated that “all decisions were made after scientific analysis and shrewd calculation” and that these were “by no means impulsive decisions.”
The reversal felt too abrupt to be shrewd, but no matter. The twentieth party congress concluded with a full political sweep for Xi. His choice for a new premier (China’s head of government) stung many people: Li Qiang, Shanghai’s party secretary on whose watch the lockdown took place. Through 2024, every governing party in developed democracies lost vote shares, including the Democratic Party in the United States, as voters tossed out the incumbents they blamed for pandemic management. In authoritarian China, the politician who oversaw the largest lockdown was elevated to the second-highest office.
And so the Covid-19 pandemic ended in China as it began, hostage to political events: willfully ignored by Wuhan authorities in the beginning and then by the central government at the end.
After moving from China to the Yale Law School, I gained some new perspectives. It was a good thing that the United States stumbled to “live with the virus.” I found one item particularly quite irksome on my return to America in 2023: a yard sign that begins “In this home we believe science is real.” The Communist Party “followed the science” of zero-Covid to its logical conclusion: barring people from their homes, testing people on a near-daily basis, and doing everything else it could to break the chains of transmission. Four decades ago, it “followed the science” to forcibly prevent many pregnancies in the pursuit of the one-child policy.
We can agree that “science is real.” But we have to keep in mind that there is a political determination involved with how to interpret the science. And that is something the lawyerly society is better at. It has lawyers interested in protecting rights, economists able to think through social science, humanists who consider ethics, and many other voices in the mix, attempting to open policy prescriptions up for debate. China doesn’t have a robust system for political contestation; engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration.
Engineering only works if it is using good data. But data probity is another of China’s casualties in the aftermath of Covid. The government has had a wobbly commitment to accurate reporting at the best of times. After the pandemic, the government has more regularly succumbed to the temptation not to share bad news. China announced a total of around 125,000 deaths related to Covid-19, an absurd undercount when scholarly estimates come to nearly 2 million excess deaths. After 2023, China is fudging many other pieces of data, from birth rates to youth unemployment.
Imagine the comedy romp that could be produced about colleagues who used to despise each other learning to come to terms while they were stuck for two weeks, unable to wash, inside their offices. Or the relationship drama between a couple at Disneyland, attempting to resolve their problems as they remained unable to depart from the happiest place on earth. Unfortunately, the state has suppressed any official memory of Shanghai’s lockdown itself. The engineers want people to forget, not to poke fun at this experience.
After zero-Covid, Shanghai is a little bit less like the Paris of the East, a little bit more like another Pyongyang. The city remains amazingly beautiful, with so much art deco, neoclassical, and modernist architecture. Its pleasures continue to deepen, with entrepreneurs competing ferociously to introduce new ways to have fun. But it also has long-term wounds that are not so visible. Owen, who is still in Shanghai, told me that lockdowns no longer come up often in conversation. “But when people get really drunk, it’s still something that people get worked up about.”
My friends felt like they were taken twice to the cleaners: first, when they couldn’t stockpile essential supplies following the surprise lockdown announcement and, later, when they couldn’t stockpile any medicine. What was the point of the April–May lockdown, they ask, when it was all given up just nine months later? Some of the older people said that the lockdown wasn’t the worst thing to happen to them, pointing to the Cultural Revolution. Younger people born after 1990, however, who had known only rising prosperity, had their first real taste of the disaster that could be inflicted by the engineering state.
The Shanghainese elites I knew had a crisis of faith. None of them quite imagined that the spikiest, most coercive instruments of the Chinese state could be pointed directly at them. Nationalist tongues stilled to silence, for a while, after they wagged for two years about how China’s pandemic controls proved its superiority over the West. No wonder business dynamism has fallen in China’s richest and most cosmopolitan city.
The three years of pandemic controls allowed Xi Jinping to indulge in central planning, not only to express certain egalitarian ideals embedded in common prosperity but also to control physical movement of millions. The one-child policy brought the Communist Party to reach deep into women’s bodies; the digital surveillance developed as part of zero-Covid has allowed it to control even a person’s daily access to her shower. There’s now a direct institutional linkage between the two policies. The neighborhood committees that took a starring role in enforcing Covid lockdowns haven’t been disbanded; they are now being used to call up recently married women to ask about their menstrual cycles and whether they wouldn’t like to have a few children. Some are able to bear it. But many young Chinese are tired of being lectured by old men to work hard and have kids while facing a horrid job market.
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