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A nurse takes a sample for a coronavirus test in a 40,000-bed temporary hospital for COVID-positive people in Shanghai, April 18, 2022.
The reporter of this story, who is based in Shanghai, is being kept anonymous because of the crackdown on information and independent journalism in China.
SHANGHAI – The social contract is tearing. In 2022, the richest city inside the world’s second-largest economy was short on food. Residential gates were sealed, and guards patrolled the perimeters as Shanghai’s citizens awaited a fearful door-knock by white-suited men that could send them away. The restaurants and malls and hospitals were closed or understaffed. Deliveries were suspended. Families were separated. Pets exterminated. At night, from somewhere in the ghost-quiet city, one could hear shrieks of impotence hurled into the pitiless stars.
Since late March, Shanghai has been in a severe lockdown under China’s “zero-COVID” policy, which seeks to snuff out all transmissions of the virus. In early March, cases spiked across several provinces, including Shandong in the east, Guangdong in the south, and Jilin in the northeast. But in Shanghai, cases climbed rapidly, transforming what began as a “soft” neighborhood-by-neighborhood lockdown in March into something indefinite and totalizing. By April 1, 26 million people, from the Bund to the Central Business District to the Tesla factory, were confined to their homes. Shanghai was closed for business.
In those early weeks, the Orwellian sketches of daily life were impossible to ignore. Robots patrolled the city, blaring directives for PCR tests. At night, Shanghai residents took to their balconies to sing and protest the lack of essential supplies. Drones interrupted them: “Please comply with COVID restrictions,” they blared. “Control your soul’s desire for freedom.” The vice premier, Sun Chunlan, came from Beijing to commandeer the pandemic prevention, ousting several Shanghai officials in the process. The handover turned the city’s virus management into ideological theater. The following day, a new slogan had emerged: “The Four ‘Musts’ and ‘Dos,’” which encompassed treating the sick, isolating the positives, mass testing, and mass monitoring.
In January 2020, when the virus was still a mystery, 11 million people in the city of Wuhan experienced a similar fate. Physical movement was halted and food supplies dwindled. But courier services still operated, albeit expensively and clumsily. Over two years later, Shanghai’s world-class food delivery system had ground to a near-total halt. Whether a migrant or a billionaire, a lawyer or a shopkeeper, all Shanghai residents were forced to ration food. They bartered with their neighbors, trading oranges for milk, beer for salt, garlic cloves for toilet paper. Vegetables and meats—obtained sporadically from government care packages and wholesalers—were shared. It was like Lord of the Flies, one Canadian resident said: “We organize ourselves, choose a leader and then figure it all out.”
During these lockdowns, some Chinese lost their lives and their loved ones, not because of COVID, but from everything else. As Shanghai’s health care system pivoted to pandemic prevention, patients with other illnesses were abandoned. This is a country where 26 million people can have a PCR test by day and get their results by night, but some of those people will not eat. That titanic myopia was all too familiar to some Shanghai residents. On April 6th, one elderly man asked officials, “Are you trying to outdo the Cultural Revolution?” He compared Shanghai to the Four Pests Campaign, a 1958 nationwide public hygiene movement to eradicate sparrows. The mass extermination led to an insect infestation, which decimated crops and contributed to China’s Great Famine. “Long before the ‘zero Covid’ policy,” The New York Times wrote, “China had a ‘zero sparrow’ policy.”
The Real Affront Was Silence
Shanghai is now at the frontier of an intense debate over China’s zero-COVID policies. Critics argue that the 2020-era toolbox of pandemic prevention—mass testing, severe lockdown, and isolation—needs an update as vaccines improve, and viruses become weaker but more infectious. Proponents of zero-COVID still prefer harsh lockdowns to “living with” the virus. The United States, which is now approaching a million deaths, has become a public-health bogeyman, not just in China but in many Asian countries. With low elderly vaccination rates, weaker vaccines, and four times the population, proponents argue, a sudden jerk in China’s pandemic policies could result in catastrophe. There are also political factors at play: China is especially risk-averse this year, as Xi Jinping prepares for an unprecedented third term as China’s president in October.
I do not think the Shanghai crisis offers easy answers to zero-COVID. The policy is a guideline, and it depends on its execution. Just as many Americans deflect from endorsing a national assault weapons ban after a mass shooting, many Chinese see Shanghai’s tragedy as a localized problem. They point to success stories like Shenzhen, which locked down for a week in March and reopened relatively unscathed, as a defense of the policy done right.
What I do know is that genuine proponents of zero-COVID should be horrified by Shanghai. The humane treatment of Shanghai residents is not incommensurable with zero-COVID, it is instrumental to it. A well-fed, well-treated, family-unseparated Shanghai is a city that becomes part of the solution. An empty-bellied, anxiety-ridden Shanghai is a matchstick set to burn. The best zero-COVID policy is, of course, a humane one.
The zero-COVID debate also obscures what really went wrong in Shanghai. The tragedy, for the most part, had less to do with the severity of the lockdowns than the attitudes around it. It was not the chains on the residential gates, the swabs slammed into the far recesses of your throat, nor the hair-rattling strikes on your door that turned the people against their own city. It was the deafening silence of top- and middle-level officials as it all unfolded. It was the failure to communicate. The failure to heed even life-threatening pleas for help. The failure to keep the emergency phone lines functioning. The failure to think it even necessary to listen. It was as if the powers that be put on noise-canceling headphones, just as the city was made to bleed.
Throughout the lockdowns, local officials touted a repeated refrain: “There is nothing we can do.” When Yu Wenming, an elderly Shanghai man, called his local official in desperate need of medical help, the official demurred.
Official: We’ve submitted a request under your name but higher authorities didn’t process it.
Yu: Then what am I supposed to do about my request being ignored for so long? Are they fine with watching me dying?
Official: I don’t know either.
Yu: What?
Official: I said I don’t know either, Mr. Yu.
Yu: Is that the end? Many days have passed but I never received a response.
Official: They didn’t give me a response.
Yu: So you just left it unsolved because you didn’t get a response?
Official: It’s not like I don’t want to address this. I’ve filed reports and requests for so many things, and yours is just one of them. Today I found a way to send a pregnant woman away. Today I handled an elderly person who passed away. Mr. Yu, it’s not that we’ve been neglecting our duties. Quite the opposite. We’ve done so many things but we are in a helpless position. Not only have we done everything that a neighborhood committee should do, we’ve also done things that a neighborhood committee is not obligated to do.
Yu: If that’s the case, couldn’t you tell the authorities above you?
Official: The only authority we have a direct line of communication with is the sub-district office. District-level agencies are out of our touch. Residents like you can try to contact them. But I have to tell you that 12345 [China’s emergency hotline] is useless.
What’s striking about this call is the total breakdown of Shanghai’s moral infrastructure. More than the physical supply chain itself, the sinews of trust in the city were ripped apart in service of a singular task. The attending neighborhood official could offer nothing for a man who was possibly at the brink of death. There was a perverse ventriloquy that unfolded in these days, as residents fought with hapless neighborhood workers whose top-level superiors floated like stratospheric eagles above the din. (Tellingly, many lower-level officials have resigned since March.)
“I can’t believe our country is like this,” the old man said before hanging up. The entire city came to a similar realization over the weeks: When push comes to shove, the country did not have their backs.
The philosopher Amartya Sen once observed a surprising trait about democracies: For all their messiness, they never seemed to let their people go hungry. Democracies are nothing if not cacophonous jungles of opinions with a neuropathic system tasked to receive and respond to the most pressing signals. Sometimes signals get distorted, or get drowned out by other signals, but the channels are always open; the taps never run dry. In China, the central nervous system is deliberately severed during times of mass mobilization. This is how famine occurred in China’s dynastic past, how it arrived in Mao’s China, and how hunger came to Shanghai in 2022.
China Post-2022
China’s internet censors often redirect blame during prolonged periods of sensitivity, as they did in Ukraine. So as the chaos in Shanghai boiled over, internet censors went to work. But this time, the efforts backfired. On one of Weibo’s top trending topics, “the U.S. is the biggest country of human rights deficits,” netizens unleashed their wrath onto the Chinese government, at least for a few hours. They criticized China’s handling of the Shanghai lockdowns, the constant diverting of blame, China’s punishing work culture, its human rights violations, and much else. “The [public] square is wonderful,” wrote one netizen remarking on all the rarefied opprobrium. “Looks like everyone has been struck awake by big daddy [the CCP].”
2020 may have been a high point in China’s campaign for global legitimacy, a year that began with China’s successful management of the pandemic and six days into the new year saw the riot at the U.S. Capitol. In the U.S., this was the year of a tragicomic presidential election, and death rates by COVID that approached America’s death toll in World War II. The year seemed to herald the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that an alternative to liberal democracy had surpassed its rival in confronting a deadly threat. In 2021, a newly confident Xi Jinping unrolled a spate of new structural reforms that set China’s economy onto a more stable track. By the fall of 2022, he envisioned that he would preside over a country ready to confront a fractured West with gusto.
March 2022 marks an indelible blotch in the story of China’s moral ascendance. In 1978, after decades of food shortages and catastrophic mass mobilization movements, Deng Xiaoping wrote a new social contract for a new China: “Leave the politics to us, and in return we will take care of you.” It was a quid pro quo: food and stability for political quiescence. For four decades, the contract worked, and every generation of (Han) Chinese grew up in a country far richer than their elders’. Now, there is a flagrant breach. Some will choose to ignore it, but others will never forget it. They will always remember that beneath the floorboards on which this compact was signed lay a silent abyss. At any unexpected moment, the floor can give out.
