Life After Lockdown

On 23 April, I ran a story by an anonymous contributor about their struggles during the sudden Shanghai lockdown. Now we're three months on, how much has life changed?

China. From ‘The World’s Factory’ to ‘The World’s Prison’.

How Xi Jinping has normalised locking people up ‘for their own good’.

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I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been told that normal life will begin again since the horrific lockdown of Shanghai in April and May of this year.

Life in Lockdown

June 1st was the first return to ‘normal’, however not all subway trains were running, dentists, museums, cinemas, pools and parks were still closed, and hospitals remained out of bounds for most. You could not sit down in a restaurant or coffee shop, and while some of the malls were open it would just be a brief visit with the kids as there was nowhere to sit down and eat.

You could only order take out, which often meant ordering at the counter but waiting for the waimai (food courier) to arrive, pick it up from the same counter and hand it to you. Everywhere in Shanghai steps became temporary dining areas.

Then we were told mid June would be a return to real normal, then July 1st and so on as more and more facets of our lives slowly became available. ‘Normal’ must be the most abused word of the 2020s. And while many of Shanghai’s resources are available once again in some form or other, one new feature of Shanghai life has not gone away since the lockdown - the lockup. 

The temporary Covid camps that sprung up scarily fast in March are back, as anyone with the virus is still whisked away and locked up. And now they have decided to lock up close contacts, almost all of whom turn out to be negative. And contacts of close contacts have their buildings with all of their neighbours locked up under house arrest.

The maths is disturbing. One single positive Covid case on 27 July resulted in 151 close contacts and 845 contacts being quarantined, or in plain English: locked up. That’s almost 1,000 people who’ve lost their freedom over the case of one man who has a 95 percent chance of not even developing symptoms.

Aside from the obvious anxiety caused by the possibility of being locked up on a daily basis, this has led to incredible uncertainty and instability in people’s social and business lives. Many find it almost impossible to plan ahead. Holidays are being cancelled. Countless restaurants, some of them longstanding famous icons of Shanghai, have closed their doors for good.

The restrictions on table numbers and whether they can open or not on a day-to-day basis put too great a financial strain on them. Many other types of service industries are closing, while shopping malls feature hastily erected hoarding that extolls the vague promise of ‘coming soon’, covering up what was a healthy business just a few months previously.

Only a few days ago a building in my compound got locked up as one person in one apartment is a contact of a close contact of a… you get the idea. There are about 600 people in that building now not allowed to leave their front door. It brought home the reminder that we could be next, and it could happen at any moment.

My wife read my stressed expression on seeing the offensive military grade heavy metal barricades in front of their doorway as if an army of zombies had to be kept out. She tried to soothe me with, “It’s just a contact, they’re probably only locked up for two days.” We immediately stopped to consider what she had just said.

We pondered how unacceptable and ridiculous such thoughts would have been only months previously, and how now we are supposed to be grateful for a mere two day surprise imprisonment. The CCP truly are the masters of social conditioning, with decades of practice.

The slowdown of the economy caused by the continuing zero-Covid policy has caused the Chinese government to make some small concession after an even worse than predicted quarter two of the financial year. They are clearly torn between not being able to back down from their disastrous policy in the face of the Omicron variant, and trying to fix the possible collapse of economic and social order. But it’s like sticking a band aid on an amputated leg.

They are constantly backtracking on their promises and moving the goalposts, which no one even believes in the first place, especially since the infamous ‘4 day lockdown’ of Shanghai. The authorities then claimed that herd immunity was part of their plan and once an 88 percent vaccination rate was reached the policy would ease. The same authorities have since announced that 90 percent of the country is now vaccinated, and yet the rules are stricter than ever.

So many of the regulations and ever-evolving rules are mystifying if you think they have much to do with Covid. But if you are familiar with the history of the CCP it makes sense. It is a reminder to the populace of who is in charge and that the people of the People’s Republic of China have no freedom.

Though their policy of locking citizens up has been around for quite a few months, it is now being increasingly used as a solution to almost every problem. Just before the lockdown several men were arrested for ‘spreading rumours’ about the upcoming lockdown, which was fiercely denied by the government. You might think that they were released once the ‘4 day’ lockdown actually did began. No, of course not. They were rearrested for divulging state secrets.

A recent scandal involving a Zhengzhou sub-branch of the People’s Bank of China whose account holders wished to withdraw their money due to rumours that the bank was no longer financially stable, woke up to find their heath codes turned red. Not only were they unable to travel to the bank to withdraw their savings but they could not even leave their homes. Corruption has adapted this new control method quickly.

In mid July a woman, whose name I will withhold, visited an old sick relative. That is basically the story! Of course it would not even be a story in any other country. However the worker was in a closed loop (another euphemism for locking people up) as she worked in a Covid hotel. She was not supposed to visit the relative but online articles quoted the authorities telling us not to worry because ‘she has been arrested and will be punished’. Even English language media such as I Love Shanghai, a popular subscription on WeChat with foreigners, reported her in the familiar tones of victim blaming. The woman’s actions are deemed as a crime in a city that even at its worst had one of the lowest rates of contagion in the world.

Luckily, so far my family has avoided being locked up. I think I’m supposed to be grateful. I can still go to a coffee shop and meet friends for a quick business meeting. And we even took a spontaneous holiday for a week in the south of China. And life is not so bad. But it isn’t normal either.

We have visas ready, bags packed, and have prepared plans A, B and C just in case. And we are tired of gagging while having cotton swabs shoved down our throats several times a week. Our children hate it and it’s grueling for them. Cruel, actually. Repeatedly scanning the entrance to every metro station, mall, restaurant and shop is becoming quite tiresome. Frequent client cancelations due to lockups is having a serious effect on my business, but I’m surviving.

I think most people in Shanghai are trying to be positive and move forward as much as they can. But not only are we all scarred for life by the severe lockdown, the threat of more imprisonment hangs over our heads every single day. Sadly, I think the government is quite happy to keep it that way.