The Shanghai Electric Kool-Aid Nucleic Acid Tests
May 30, 2022
The following was written in real time. All errors are my own.
Sunday March 20: Lockdown Day Minus 8
MY son and I take our COVID-19 tests, and we then go on a ride to the supermarket. On the way back, I decide to go a different route, just for the sake of variation, and get stopped by an officious young traffic cop who after scrutinising me for some time, decides to make an issue of the fact that my helmet wasn’t fastened properly (the clip has fallen off). My scowling and scoffing at his pettiness probably didn’t do me any good at all, and when he took a picture of the registration plate on the back of my scooter it occurred to me that I might actually be in trouble: I have been riding this illegal bike (with fake plates) for two years.
Shanghai was pretty quiet. People are staying home and hoping this will blow over. There is some doubt that it won’t. There were 17 confirmed symptomatic and 492 asymptomatic cases for the whole of Saturday, which is apparently a city record.
Monday March 21: Lockdown Day Minus 7
SHANGHAI’S coronavirus cases rise again, but the approach of the government is surprising: The city’s compound-by-compound, district-by-district, “no one-size-fits-all” approach to “dynamic clearance” is an unannounced experiment in anarcho-syndicalism.
On the one hand, zero-COVID fans have decried Shanghai’s exceptionalism and said it should shut the place down completely, before it is too late, like everywhere else in China. On the other, communities that happen to be in some of the stricter zones are tearing out their hair after the imposition of two-week lockdowns just because a resident happened to be a close contact. One Weibo user said: "Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen have had three different epidemic response models. Hong Kong is the worst but will be the first to open up, Shenzhen is the most effective, and Shanghai may be the most tiring, and even the most miserable."
I am busy all morning trying to make sense of all the lockdowns in all the different parts of town, and the strange swirling sense that things are getting both better and worse, depending on where you are and how you look at things. Zero-COVID is a policy target, while “dynamic clearance” seems to be more a state of mind. Over the day, my colleagues share details from their own particular lockdown hell, and talk about one fellow resident who despite being locked down throughout, is now being subjected to punitive quarantine in a government hotel for failing to turn up for a nucleic acid test. And meanwhile, the rain pelts down, which adds to the sense of crisis and slows our grocery deliveries even further.
Tuesday March 22: Lockdown Day Minus 6
IT feels like exhaustion is finally setting in, both among the public and the health authorities. There were 2,338 confirmed cases yesterday, and 2,432 asymptomatics. The success of China’s zero-COVID approach was for a long time enough to justify these soul-crushing annoyances, these spirit-sapping state interventions into the minutiae of everyday life. The more the caseload rises, the more this justification crumbles.
I go to the supermarket and brood over the possibility that Aldi will suddenly be locked down and I will be stuck in there for at least 48 hours.
Wednesday March 23: Lockdown Day Minus 5
THE city is swirling with rumours that we are going to be fully locked down, but the government has denied them, saying they would continue with their “slicing and gridding” approach, sealing us off compound by compound when the need arises. On Weibo, some are grumbling that the piecemeal lockdowns amount to death by a thousand cuts and are causing emotional distress. They say the government might as well announce a week- or two-week shutdown and be done with it.
The veneer of civilisation isn’t quite as thin as movies like Contagion like to make out, but it does get a little patchy in places. Aldi’s shelves had been stripped bare by panic buyers this afternoon, and the bins on our road were overflowing. Meanwhile, we have to show the guards our entry-exit cards whenever we pass through the compound’s gates.
Friday March 25: Lockdown Day MInus 4
AT some time in the afternoon, as the rain pours down on grim, grey Shanghai, I finally manage to get some bread and milk delivered. It occurs to me that China is a country that has been run for so long by leaders who have absolutely no idea about the needs and everyday feelings of ordinary people, and whose autocratic reflexes when it comes to pandemic control are exactly the same as they would be with any other crisis, and involves suppression, intimidation and shutdown.
What’s going on in China right now reflects not so much the challenges of COVID-19, but the instincts and equilibria of a one-party state, which is institutionally deaf to the needs of its people but has enough power to survive regardless. Only in China would anyone worry whether or not we should take literally the Shanghai Party Secretary’s promise to build a “fortress of iron” to keep the coronavirus out. One wouldn’t put it past them, especially with the might of the Baosteel Group to fall back on.
Saturday March 26: Lockdown Day Minus 3
IN the afternoon, we are supplied with home antigen tests, and I have a brief feeling that this might mark some sort of liberalisation, a feeling that is quickly dashed when it is revealed we will have to go through the usual testing rigmarole - queuing next to the compound fountain for our nose and throat swabs - again tomorrow morning. And so, what was the point of the home test? It is quite clear that we are just part of one giant non-consensual experiment by the authorities. We are, of course, the victims of what would in the western democracies be described as safetyism, but this in China is where the defaults are, where the political equilibrium lies and has lain for decades.
Sunday March 27: Lockdown Day Minus 2
ANOTHER queue, another test, and another attempt to get my son to submit to a swab up the nose without recoiling, without batting away the hand of the nurse, without wincing and groaning. I am eventually forced to hold his hands and secure his head while the nurse pokes the swab violently up his left nostril.
The crowd behind us, consisting mostly of Shanghainese pensioners, gets impatient and starts calling on him to “be a man” and “show courage”. My instinct is to tell them all to fuck off. “Sorry,” my son says on the way back.
I check the case numbers. There were 45 symptomatic infections and 2,363 asymptomatic ones in Shanghai on Saturday.
Monday March 28: Lockdown Day Minus 1
THE Shanghai government, in a wild U-turn, has decided to lock down half this city for the next three days and the other half (my half) for five days thereafter.
Only on Saturday, a health official by the name of Wu Fan was saying that lockdown here in Shanghai was impractical and economically devastating. She turned up again today to say that, well, the test results showed that it had spread more widely than they had first anticipated, so the policy has to change.
It is perhaps unfair and overly melodramatic to suggest that Shanghai is hellbent on maximally inconveniencing its citizens. But even if it isn’t, the effect is much the same. There will be more testing, more testing, and more testing. Delivery services are already strained to breaking point. This morning I managed to get a Burger King breakfast delivery, which was then promptly stolen at the gate before I had an opportunity to pick it up. I was seething. My son was shocked and disturbed by my rage.
Footage is shared across social media of the crowded quarantine facilities and the miserable inmates who are lucky even to get a bed. The main complaint is that in an enclosed space with dozens of other infectees, they have little chance of producing the two negative tests they require to be released back into the wild.
The thought of being locked up with them is so mortifying that I consider and reconsider and reconsider again my visit to the supermarket in the afternoon. I eventually go and acquire much needed provisions.
Like most people, I am not scared of COVID-19, which for the vaccinated, is generally no worse than the flu: I am scared of Shanghai’s draconian response to it. I am scared of week upon week of claustrophobic misery in some converted meeting hall. Shanghai has had to confine tens of thousands already, the vast majority of whom are asymptomatic and should really have be allowed to stay at home, but the Chinese Communist Party’s concern is the People in the abstract, rather than as individuals.
Tuesday March 29: Lockdown Day 1
COMMUNIST Party propaganda rag The Global Times concedes that Shanghai has performed an about-turn, but says this is still the “minimum cost” required to keep this virus under control.
Shanghai has decided to go full-on with its lockdowns, not even permitting residents in Pudong and elsewhere to leave their apartment buildings. It sometimes feels that defeating the virus is a political goal that is more important than public welfare. But what really irks Shanghai’s foreign contingent, I think, is the militarisation, the mobilisation, the entire Party hierarchy exerting control over every level of society, all the way down to the guards locking the gates of our apartment blocks.
I fail to get hold of any fresh supplies: we discover on our way out that our entire compound has already been sealed off because of one case in one of the buildings. In the evening, we are ordered to do more tests, as if there is anything that yet another round will discover at this point. I lose my temper at a family I think is jumping the queue: they aren’t. Tempers are frayed.
One thing’s for sure: the authorities are terror-struck. They are terrified that they will fail. Clearly they are gambling on the fact that they can still nip this in the bud, but the fear is that we already long past the bud stage. These lockdowns are costly, psychologically and economically. The grumbling will intensify if they also prove to be useless against Omicron.
Wednesday March 30: Lockdown Day 2
BY the mid-morning, my anxieties are relieved quite significantly by a large delivery of meats, eggs, fruits and vegetables. We should now have more than enough to get us through this ordeal, which is likely going to last for more than a week, at current rates of infection.
Outside, dozens of couriers pass deliveries over the compound gate. There are rows of shelving filled with parcels and boxes and bulging carrier bags. Shanghai announced this morning that almost 6,000 new cases were detected yesterday, the majority of which were still asymptomatic. People across the city take the opportunity to complain: if this current outbreak is too dangerous for us even to leave our apartments, then why the hell are they forcing us to gather in large numbers every day to get swabbed?
It feels that this mass mobilisation is now more a matter of political display rather than evidence-based healthcare. This, after all, is the way the regime’s sinews twitch. China’s Overton Window is firmly skewed in the direction of military-style mobilisation, the glorification of the collective and the devaluation of the individual, and this latest authoritarian spasm is frankly the least one could have expected.
Last night, the Shanghai government warned people that they would be punished with the full force of the law if they do not comply with “prevention and control” measures. That includes people who do not submit to nucleic acid tests or try to fake their results, as well as the usual motley crew of price gougers and rumour mongers. Of course, there are actually no legal protections here, and there are catch-all offences concerning “public order” that can get you locked up for practically anything. China’s Emergency Response Law also allows authorities to seize control of land, property and possessions as they see fit, and one should not expect to rely on lawyers to ensure that such rules are not abused.
Thursday March 31: Lockdown Day 3
CIRCULATING on social media is a list of people who have perished for want of medical care during the latest lockdown. This crisis has demonstrated that this is a political system in which the individual doesn’t matter. What matters is the collective. The People. The Party. The Motherland.
So many people overseas are thinking that China will sooner or later have to face the reality that the price of containment isn't worth paying. They don't understand how much Chinese people are expected to tolerate suffering, how suffering is part of the political culture nurtured by the ruling Party.
Friday April 1: Lockdown Day 4
THERE are small and possibly misleading signs that we are turning a corner here, as far as COVID-19 goes, with the number of community detections dropping to about 4,500. Still, with a new round of testing throughout Shanghai’s western districts, one would expect the figure to rebound in the next few days. Suspicions about the numbers abound.
We go for our tests. Long queues thread out from the compound square and over the bridge. The hazmat crew wave us through each checkpoint, one bewildered resident at a time. It is, apart from anything else, ruthlessly efficient.
Saturday April 2: Lockdown Day 5
THE Shanghai caseload surged again on Friday, a reflection of the 14 million or so tests conducted throughout Puxi. China makes one feel helpless. The entire machinery of the state seems designed to strip all meaning from our puny individuality.
Infections in Britain are also at a record high, and I fret about this huge divergence in approach between China and the rest of the world, and how it pertains to my prospects of leaving this increasingly suffocating one-party state
Sunday April 3: Lockdown Day 6
SUN Chunlan, head of the government COVID taskforce, is in the city and telling authorities to make sure that disruptions are minimised. Our building WeChat group is sharing a message saying that when it comes to testing, priority will now be given to medical personnel, delivery workers and people known to have been in close contact with positive cases.
A plea has been circulating on WeChat calling for asymptomatic cases to be left to isolate at home, rather than being confined to filthy, ill-equipped “central quarantine” facilities. There’s a sense that things are changing, that the Leviathan is edging towards compromise.
I make lunch. I make dinner. I watch snooker. I wash up. I wash up again. I wash up yet again. Housework is Promethean. V.S. Naipaul would have been appalled by the distractions. Were his books worth all the toil endured by other people? I suppose you have to have the personality and “pregnant selfishness” (not to mention the talent) to be able to force that sort of transaction on the people around you.
In Shanghai, as case numbers surge, there’s a sense of emergency, a sense that something is shifting and that policymaking is responding to public discontent. Regardless of the mistakes it might have made previously, the government is in a genuine dilemma. As the pundits overseas have said, coexistence with COVID-19 looks like an inevitability. The only question is: when, and how quickly? The economy could sink. The masses could lash out. The challenge, as always, for an autocratic government: the worse the repression, the less the people have to lose and the more controls you have to impose to keep the people in line.
Doing the rounds on social media is a recording of a conversation with a disease control official. She claims that the entire lockdown is being conducted without any regard to the science, and is essentially a political operation. She urges asymptomatic people to defy the quarantine rules and stay at home.
The numbers are stark: there have been more than 40,000 cases in Shanghai over the course of March, and not a single serious case has been reported. Is this because the data is fake? Dr. Zhu, the CDC expert, says in the recording that many cases remain unreported, and that the testing skews towards false negatives. Insinuations abound that COVID deaths have gone unreported.
Monday April 4: Lockdown Day 7
THERE is no sign at all that any sort of tipping point has been reached, and the number of new infections has soared again. My son, thus far, is showing previously unseen levels of resilience and stoicism, but as his bacon, his noodles and his pork chops run out over the next few days, his patience might dwindle too. He’s already threatening to defy the lockdown and go out.
The situation is getting out of hand. Everyone knows stories. Everyone is sharing videos on social media about the latest outrage inflicted by the medical-industrial complex. One shows a woman being dragged out of her apartment in her pyjamas for refusing to comply with regulations. A policeman in hazmat gear recites her infractions. Her husband is restrained as she is taken away. The human costs of zero-COVID are becoming increasingly self-evident.
Tuesday April 5: Lockdown Day 8
SHANGHAI is under a familiar blanket of grey and it appears very much as if we are going to be locked down for at least another week.
I keep getting agonising flashes of fear that I will spend the remainder of my life like this, confined to quarters and deprived of even the most basic pleasures, and that I will never see my mother (or even England) again.
I listen to Shanghai’s now daily COVID-19 press briefing and to Wu Qianyu, an official with the local health commission, who says Shanghai’s policies will not waver, though of course they already wavered when they U-turned on lockdown.
There was another surge in asymptomatic cases, with the number at 13,000 yesterday. Online, on Weibo, netizens are having a most interesting discussion in which ordinary Chinese resentments against wealthy, privileged and cosmopolitan Shanghai come to the fore, with the “major financial hub” (as we always call it) supposedly seeking special treatment and trying to redefine what “asymptomatic” means.
Essentially, Shanghai’s definition of “asymptomatic” (which seems simply to be “no pulmonary effects”) is creating a misleading impression about how serious Omicron truly is. With such a large number of cases there isn’t even enough capacity to do the CT scans that would properly determine whether someone was exhibiting pulmonary symptoms or not. One commentator writes, “This data has no meaning except to show that it is fake.”
Parts of the foreign press are talking about a “human rights disaster” in Shanghai. This raises some local hackles. People from China are asking: what are the human rights benefits of letting a million people die? This is not an argument that can be immediately dismissed.
Wednesday April 6: Lockdown Day 9
EVERYTHING is pretty hectic, and by the end of the morning, my son is snivelling on the sofa about how he’s “starving” because he can’t get any crisps, bread or junk food, even though we still have piles of noodles, yoghurts and apples. I start to lose my patience, and there are signs of tempers fraying city-wide.
In the afternoon, Wu Zunyou of the China Center for Disease Control effectively says that there is nothing wrong with China’s existing policies that cannot be solved by implementing them even more strongly. Thus, we must double down with the quarantines, with the lockdowns, with the “dynamic clearance” of all new transmissions.
My son and I both know we are running steadily out of food, but we also know we are not besieged by Russian troops. We are not reeling from missile attacks. We still have a significant supply of eggs, noodles and pasta. Still, I worry this lockdown is going to last far longer than anyone anticipated.
Soon enough, our building’s WeChat group receives an official message from the residential committee outlining the delivery arrangements over the next few weeks and signalling that we need to hunker down for the long haul.
I read the cascades of messages from the people in my compound, where they discuss the possibility that a shipment of strawberries they ordered for the building might be contaminated by COVID-19, and how it might be better to cancel the order just in case. The fear is still there. Is it fear of infection, or fear of quarantine, which is driving their ultracaution?
Thursday April 7: Lockdown Day 10
OUTSIDE the birds sing cheerfully. We are at least able to take a brief walk in the compound for another test. There were, alas, almost 20,000 new asymptomatic cases reported on Wednesday and Shanghai continues to drive down the Chinese Communist Party’s political cul-de-sac. There are faint rumours that the lockdown will be lifted on the eleventh. There are then more rumours that it will last until the fifteenth. This is clearly a volatile, changing situation.
Such large-scale government interventions into public life allow backstreet tyrants to fulfill their life’s ambition to impose gratuitous discomfort and misery on their fellow man in the name of the Greater Good. But it gets worse than that. Images are floating around the internet of a man in a hazmat suit beating a dog to death because its owner tested positive. Under the rubric of “zero COVID”, sadists and psychopaths are able to seize the opportunity to fulfill their urges while staying on the side of righteousness.
Schadenfreude is, of course, the reflex response among foreign media, especially the Daily Telegraph, which talks about China receiving its “comeuppance” after gloating for years about getting its pandemic response right and minimising the number of deaths. The subtext, of course, is that China caused all this in the first place and deserves to bear the brunt.
Friday April 8: Lockdown Day 11
THE number of positive cases yesterday rose beyond 20,000, with another 800 symptomatic infections.
The CDC’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, said yesterday that it would take another 10 days to eliminate community transmission. Basically, test, isolate, repeat for at least a week until the numbers stop going up. Naturally, the city is struggling to feed itself by now, and the government is reportedly considering taking on the responsibility for the whole 26 million of us, and will suspend all private deliveries henceforward.
The absurd Global Times is accusing “anti-China forces” of stirring up discontent in Shanghai about what it euphemistically describes as the city’s “static management status”. “[T]hey are blinded by their bias toward China and has (sic) only focused on the most extreme situations in the country's broader fight against the virus and to keep ensure (sic) steady economic development.” Included on the list of “anti-China forces” appears to be the European Union Chamber of Commerce, which dared to say the other day that “zero-COVID” was undermining Shanghai’s reputation as a financial hub.
There is a sense that what’s happening in Shanghai has a sort of punitive quality. This is not simply what leaders believe to be the optimal solution to “clearing” COVID cases, and is more a political statement about what the ruthless bastards in Beijing are prepared to do to achieve their political objectives ahead of the Communist Party Congress this autumn. This all cascades down to the grassroots level, and is reflected in the petty, pernickety rules about what can be delivered to compounds. Alcohol, of course, is out. Strawberries, of course, have been rejected. Snacks, naturally, will be forbidden. With all the old timers on the residential committees now in charge, and with all their experiences of hardship, this is a great opportunity to force youngsters to chi ku (“eat bitterness”) and live off cabbage and congee for a month. Those old timers thereby pass on their understanding of what they think it means to be Chinese, which involves being almost starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and almost persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution.
Saturday April 9: Lockdown Day 12
THERE were another twenty thousand cases yesterday, and nearly every ordinary resident is fretting about food supplies. At times like these, it is the utter, abject powerlessness of being an individual living in China that really starts to hit home.
I fiddle about all day, trying to rustle up meals from our dwindling range of ingredients. My son makes himself some sort of pancake with three eggs, and then decides he doesn’t want to eat it. We are tested again in the afternoon, and there are some indications that we will be allowed out to mooch around in the compound by tomorrow if there are no new cases here.
Sunday April 10: Lockdown Day 13
SHANGHAI’S caseload yesterday remained at more than 20,000 and it still feels like we are in this for the long haul, but at least we have enough food. And milk. And wine. With wine, I am happy. I can relax.
The Financial Times’ data reporter Andy Lin notes on Twitter that the Shanghai outbreak is closely following the one in Hong Kong, even with the harsher restrictions, meaning that even more draconian measures should be expected soon. Someone else on Twitter shrewdly points out the central role that hunger has played in Chinese politics over the years, and the legitimacy that the Chinese Communist Party derives from being able to feed the people.
Videos are being shared across social media of people screaming out into the night from their high rises. There are recordings of residents pleading with the police for food. “What happens if I leave and get arrested? Will I get fed?” Meanwhile, there are stories of people being released out of the quarantine centres and not being allowed home by their residential committee.
Monday April 11: Lockdown Day 14
THERE were 25,000 cases yesterday, but we learn that more than 7,000 “residential units” across the whole of the city will be given leave to ease some of the restrictions and allow “appropriate activity” in their neighbourhoods, so long as the usual social distancing restrictions are upheld. The first districts to announce are from Shanghai’s remote outskirts, including the island of Chongming.
I keep an eye on a WeChat group featuring COVID-positive foreigners. Most seem to be complaining about their residential committees acting beyond their powers and trying to strong-arm them into going into central quarantine. A residential committee’s power is vague and ill-defined. Like all power in China, it is derived from the Communist Party.
Tuesday April 12: Lockdown Day 15
SHANGHAI’S medical-industrial complex summons us all for another round of nucleic acid testing at 7.50 and we queue, dutifully, for half an hour or so. It was announced late last night that our compound is still locked down and probably will be for at least another two weeks, even as some of my colleagues expect to be released, tentatively, back into the community today.
If there is ever a threat of revolution, this is the template that the authorities will use. A political contagion will be contained block by block, compound by compound, by all these dutiful Party-affiliated residential committees with their ill-defined powers. What is happening now isn’t a special case reserved for emergencies. It is the Party’s twenty-first century high-tech playbook.
Wednesday April 13: Lockdown Day 16
OVERNIGHT, Shanghai cancelled some ill-conceived “anti-epidemic gala” it was planning for tonight, which netizens mercilessly mocked and castigated as a waste of resources. Part of me wanted to see it, wanted to experience what would have inevitably have been a disgusting, maudlin propaganda exercise.
I work. Shanghai is hit by a formidable cold front that turns the incipient summer of the last few days into a brutal winter. I work more.
I spoke to an American woman on WeChat about her mistreatment at the hands of her neighbours after she received a positive COVID diagnosis. They called her “foreign trash” and tried to exclude her from group buying to try to get her out of the building.
Thursday April 14: Lockdown Day 17
SOMETHING interesting happened on Weibo last night, with a tsunami of sarcasm and vitriol directed against the government. There was an attempt - presumably by state media - to promote a hashtag saying the United States was the world’s biggest violator of human rights, which netizens quickly howled down. One said: “Yeah we seal people's doors, kill pets, waste medical resources so patients with more urgent needs miss the opportunities to be treated, but our death number is zero!”
Much of the content was erased once the censors had woken up, but one diligent VOA reporter thankfully took screenshots along the way, giving us a valuable glimpse into what people really think when the authorities aren’t breathing down their necks. There are of course many “polls” by the likes of Pew which claim to show that Chinese people are the most optimistic about their future and the most trusting of their government, which can only be explained as a manifestation of collective Stockholm Syndrome or by the fact that saying anything else would land oneself in deep trouble with the authorities.
The criticism of zero-COVID is still bubbling over by the time I start to look at it in the middle of the morning, with some people saying the lockdowns are disproportionate, and others saying China’s data is suspect and that there must be deaths. Generally, many people wonder whether zero-COVID is already completely untenable.
One cri de coeur posted on WeChat starts to take over the country’s attention in the afternoon. Entitled “The Shanghai people’s patience is already at its upper limit”, it details everything that has gone wrong in the lockdown, all the abuses and violations, all its absurdities.
This feels like a genuinely revolutionary moment, concocted in punishing isolation and quarantine. This is what people meant when they pointed out the liberational quality of the World Wide Web. Whether it will last is doubtful. Last night, Xi Jinping once more tied his shirt, his pants and his socks to this particular mast, saying - during a jolly to the island province of Hainan - that the cumbersomely named “dynamic clearance” policy would not change, and that we - meaning everyone else - will beat this thing.
Naturally, that astonishing, game-changing WeChat post is censored. Not only must we suffer this miserable and unending lockdown, we must also be denied all outlets to criticise it. The Party is everything, all-embracing and all-consuming. All dissent must be directed outwards, particularly towards the West and the United States. Nothing else will be permitted. The Party is unaccountable and its leadership is infallible. This, sooner or later, will explode, will crumble, will end.
The psychological impact is going to be felt for years. My son burst into tears twice today, for reasons he didn’t want to explain to me. I am genuinely worried about his mental health.
A country is bound to suffer when its overriding priority is nothing but the objectives and targets of a remote but overwhelmingly powerful central government. The targets are chased at the expense of reality and rationality and the objective situation on the ground. The leaders are accountable only to each other, and are driven by their own pride and ego. They have no understanding or experience of what the people are really going through. They are so aloof and disconnected that they even think that a “gala” aimed at rallying support against this outbreak is a good idea, even though everyone with any sense thinks it is tacky and crass and stupid and maudlin and undignified.
I take an unauthorised walk through the compound. Everything is utterly silent. Shanghai, a city of 25 million people, is barren, bereft, stripped of life.
Saturday April 16: Day 19
THIS morning, after yet another round ot tests (and another opportunity to get infected by my fellow compound inhabitants), followed by an irritating encounter with elderly neighbours who thought it necessary to point out that I am a foreigner, I suddenly felt overwhelmed and on the brink of a major temper tantrum.
I quickly pulled myself together, made my son some chips and calmed myself down with tea and TV. I order pizzas and spaghetti for tomorrow and pray that the volunteers will deliver something so frivolous, something so luxurious. If it arrives tomorrow, our food problems will be solved, temporarily at least.
I watch the opening matches at the Crucible, which give me a lot of pleasure.
On Twitter, some foreigner shilling for the Chinese media is saying everything is fine and that all the problems in Shanghai are being exaggerated by the foreign press. He has food, so he presumes everyone else has too.
Sunday April 17: Day 20
OUTSIDE of our COVID lockdown bubble, I have paid little attention to the news. I have no idea what is going on in Ukraine or elsewhere and this makes me feel slightly ashamed. In the Telegraph, a military expert argues that Russia’s troop losses are equivalent to those in the Somme, and are simply unsustainable. NATO also seems on the verge of expanding into the steadfastly neutral Finland and Sweden, something that was unthinkable before all this happened.
Shanghai will, it says, eliminate new infections in non-quarantined areas by April 20, which is Wednesday. There has been, according to the government, a turning point in the number of new cases in those areas. This, however, does not mean they will let us out.
In the evening, we have yet another round of tests, and a long line of weary residents curls across the entire compound and inches slowly forward.
At it happens, we remain as much at the mercy of China’s medical industrial complex as our fellow compound inmates. We all slump obediently towards the testing station, invigilated by volunteers in their rumpled and slightly ridiculous hazmat suits, and it feels as if our agency, our very dignity, is being stripped away piece by piece, swab by swab.
Monday April 18: Day 21
I HAD a bad night, spiked with anxiety about dying in China’s degenerate data-driven authoritarian dystopia and leaving my poor son alone to fend for himself, torn apart by grief and isolation.
As ever, I console myself with events over at the Crucible, with Ronnie O’Sullivan cruising through to the second round.
The COVID numbers fell today, fuelling more optimistic talk of a turning point. Some of us haven’t been out of our compound for more than 35 days.
Adapting Orwell’s famous formulation, I write: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a swab being stuffed up a human nose - forever.” It refers of course to the “boot stamping on a human face”, and it is worth looking at that passage of 1984 in full:
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
No enjoyment of the process of life. That seems to be the underlying characteristic of Communist Party rule as a whole. Everything is instrumentalist. Everything serves. Everything can and will be sacrificed on behalf of the Whole, as defined by the Party itself. We should have expected this approach to controlling an infectious disease because it is merely an extension of their overall political strategy,
Tuesday April 19: Day 22
IF anyone still has any illusions about the nature of Chinese Communist Party governance, he or she should pay attention to the decision, made in the early hours of this morning by people in positions of power, to pry open the door of a 94-year old woman and drag her to a central quarantine facility.
Anyone with an ounce of compassion and common sense knows that this is a shocking and cruel “one size fits all” policy that puts her at disproportionate risk, and threatens to ruin what little time she has left with her family, all in order to achieve this unworkable target to “clear COVID at the social level” by the end of tomorrow.
All this, of course, is not the result of individual errors or lapses in moral judgement, but is the direct consequence of a top-down political system in which apparatchiks and cadres at all levels are motivated only to please their superiors, and are not accountable at all to the law and to ordinary people.
In the middle of the morning, we receive another government allocation: cabbage, peppers, a piece of cheap steak, eggs, rice, and some toilet paper. I understand the remarkable logistic might that has gone into this delivery, made (I presume) to thousands of households throughout the city. At the same time, I refuse to be grateful: the government has engineered our isolation and is now trying to resolve the problems its policies have brought about.
Wednesday April 20: Day 23
THERE’S the general feeling here that Shanghai is at a crossroads, that its reputation as an international city is as much in danger as Hong Kong’s, with the barbarians and vandals of Beijing imposing their vindictive will. Beijing doesn’t care about the mass exodus of foreigners. Beijing doesn’t care about Shanghai’s ciabatta supplies. Beijing cares about obedience, about toeing the line. For all Shanghai’s status, it accounts for only a few percentage points of the country’s economic growth and they figure they can handle that.
Some believe Omicron is already out there, the “genie already out of the bottle”, and the only way authorities can possibly bring it under control is by hermetically sealing up the entire city and starving us all to death. This would also require sealing off the entire country from the rest of the outside world.
Sooner or later, as Zhong Nanshan acknowledged in a widely circulated article this week, there has to be a reckoning. The opponents of China’s current strategy believe that the longer this reckoning is delayed, the worse it will become. But even the supporters of the current strategy now admit that the reckoning will indeed come, and the only way is to figure out how co-existence can be achieved gradually, with minimum damage.
Damage, right now, is certainly nowhere near the minimum. Personally, my son and I are more or less fine, but thousands (probably millions) aren’t. The ability to “eat bitterness” is again being celebrated. The Chinese Communist Party, with its institutional memories of suffering, is addicted to the idea that people need to endure misery in the name of some greater good. In this age of plenty, this age of technological superbity, there’s no reason for anyone to “eat bitterness” and to celebrate it is perverse.
Thursday April 21: Day 24
ANOTHER nucleic acid test. Food, right now, isn’t generally a problem. We have money. We have access to supplies. The problem is still the helplessness, the lack of agency, the sense of being at the mercy of irrational forces that are beyond our control. We are not uncomfortable: we are just tired of being treated like diseased children.
Friday April 22: Day 25
SHANGHAI is still in hell. This is officially Day 22 of Puxi’s punitive lockdown, but most of us have been shut off from the outside world for much longer. With daily cases still in excess of 15,000, there is no sign of any sort of relaxation of any kind. We have access to plenty of food and drink, and are far better off than most of the city’s captive population, but this is still no way to live.
Saturday April 23: Day 26
THE focus of our attention is a social media furore, a battle between netizens and censors over a mostly innocuous video concerning Shanghai’s COVID-19 outbreak, a montage of all the cries of frustration and anger from members of the public during these difficult times.
Named the Voices of April, the video pans across a silent, monochrome skyscape and plays in all the sounds of this lockdown: the government official insisting that Shanghai would continue with its “slice-and-grid” containment strategy and would not lock down, the volte-face a few days later, the pleas and complaints to various people in authority, the singing and shouting from the balconies and the plaintive cries in the face of state heavy-handedness. The content, in the end, seems less important than the hamfisted way the censors tried so desperately to shut it down.
Marxists used to say that the true face of oppression unmasks itself in a crisis. Here in China they barely bother to conceal the oppression at all, but it feels as if there is something potentially game-changing about what the regime has recently revealed about itself.
The gerontocracy, of course, thinks we ought to suck it all up and “eat bitterness” on behalf of the Party and the Nation, just as they had to do in their youth. The people, on the other hand, have had enough, and many are likening their current state of mind to the rage that erupted after the death of the whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang back in early 2020.
Some shrewd and cynical observers on Weibo point out that back then, everything soon settled down into a sort of pained acceptance, and it will no doubt do so again once this fresh incident fades from the immediate memory. In the end, acceptance is easier. Lying on the ground with someone’s foot on your throat isn’t nice, but unless you can remove the foot in one quick sweeping blow, trying to escape is likely to bring even more pain.
There is a general sense that “zero-COVID” in China has finally jumped the shark. Despite a month in lockdown and a remarkably overzealous testing regime, infections remain essentially out of control. The local government - anxious to meet the unrealistic goals set by its superiors - is resorting to increasingly unreasonable actions, including the construction of metal cages in the entrances of buildings and the sprinkling of lime along the highways to, er, decontaminate the asphalt? This all feels like the Great Leap Forward, but instead of unrealistic grain and steel production targets, we have unrealistic virus containment and case clearance targets instead. The behaviour of the state in the face of Omicron is merely an extension of its behaviour in other instances, and arises from the lack of accountability and the subordination of law to the naked but nebulous and hydra-headed power of the Communist Party.
But it is also a reflection of their inability to control this stealthy, highly-infectious variant. Right now, the authorities are jabbing away at their controllers, and pressing random buttons as the cases pile up like Tetris blocks.
Sunday April 24: Day 27
AFTER going out for yet another PCR test - the fifth in six days, I think - I then vow to pay no more attention to this miserable virus, or to the Chinese Communist Party’s cruel and clodhopping response to it, for the rest of the day.
Something amazing could be written about these last few weeks, about the growing desperation of the floundering local government and about the rising bile and ire of the Shanghainese public. One day, I might have been capable of writing it..
All the fatalities in this outbreak have, so far, been the very elderly who have not been vaccinated. It is the very elderly whom we are protecting when we lock down the entire city. It is, for example, the likes of 90-year old former supremo Jiang Zemin and all the other gerontocrats. Perhaps the decision-making would be different if the average age of China’s leadership was a little lower.
The London Review of Books treats the Shanghai lockdown with a sort of detached sense of whimsy. The author of this essay, Mimi Jiang, includes anecdotes about the absurdity of Shanghai’s authoritarian response that I haven’t come across before, including the inability of a foreigner with an “abnormal erection” to get medical treatment.
One bulletin that annoyed many people concerned a foreigner with an abnormal erection who had to wait fifty hours in a quarantine hotel before he was sent to hospital. He missed the optimal time for surgery but the doctors managed to save the penis. The hospital then boasted about its excellent care, inciting locals who had been denied treatment because of Covid. There’s a mix of xenophilia and xenophobia here. Amid the jeers, Shanghai has won another nickname: Edinburgh. In Chinese, aidingbao means ‘penis loving city’.
Monday April 25: Day 28
AT the morning press briefing, the Shanghai government hints at some sort of nuance, some relief from the all-encompassing lockdown. A district chief says they will “optimise” the categorisation of risk zones. They will break down the “residential units” into something smaller. This, presumably, is why they have been putting up green fencing outside individual buildings and apartment blocks: to let more of us out, they need to lock the infectious up.
Mired in the day-to-day reality of being here in Shanghai and having to survive and provide for one’s family, one sometimes loses sight of how astonishing it is that a small handful of unaccountable apparatchiki are so in control of the levers of power that they can confine 25 million people to their apartments for an entire month.
Tuesday April 26: Day 29
WE were tested again early this morning, the seventh time in eight days and the sixteenth time since the start of the month. We slouch through the compound in the rain. My son is exasperated about having to squander his free time.
Wednesday April 27: Day 30
OVER the course of the day, I come across Dr. John Campbell, talking about the Shanghai lockdown and how pointless it all is, above all else. Omicron is out there, and is no more amenable to containment than the measles.
“They are trying to achieve by human will that which is scientifically impossible,” he says, reminding one of all the harebrained and ill-fated mass mobilisation campaigns that have blighted this country since the Communist Party came to power 70 years ago. And indeed, instead of an army of peasants banging pots and pans to scare the sparrows to death, we have an army volunteers spraying toxic lime onto the roads and polluting the water supplies with torrents of disinfectant, even though neither would make the slightest bit of difference to the risk of COVID infection.
The collateral damage of zero-COVID will be with Shanghai for years. On top of the economic costs, the psychological costs are mounting. Doing the rounds, and evading the censorship, is a video of a foreigner literally having a breakdown as he tries to escape from confinement.
Friday April 29: Day 31
VIDEOS are shared on social media showing people banging their pots and pans in protest against the lack of food deliveries. I presume the protest is more about being locked up for 30 or more days, and about being treated like unhygienic children by China’s authoritarian medical-industrial complex. In any case, there is also a video of a woman shouting through a loud hailer that discontent is being stirred up by “foreign forces”, which is a particularly sinister development.
Saturday April 30: Day 32
IT is the first day of the Labour Day holiday, but it is really just another weekend in the Shanghai lockdown. I begin the day like I have begun every day for the last two weeks, catching up with the night’s snooker.
The World Snooker Championship is nearly over and this already makes me feel sad. In fact, the end of every regular sporting event makes me feel sad, probably because of the way it marks out the passage of time and the completion of another year.
I look out of the window and watch the volunteers with their hazmat suits and their sprays, shrouding every food delivery in a dizzying miasma of disinfectant. There is no clear evidence that this makes even the slightest difference when it comes to the transmission of viruses like SARS-CoV-2.
It has become popular now to use the word “formalism”, which is the official Communist term for “going through the motions” or “box-ticking”. The concept also expresses something deeper about the nature of Communist Party rule, including its dependence on collective mobilisation as well as its totalitarian instincts. Dissent, even expressed in the mildest forms, simply cannot be tolerated. Satire and cynicism are beyond the pale. Even a lack of enthusiasm has to be cracked down upon.
Another thing that has become clear: Chinese political power works like a ratchet. After every emergency that arises, sometimes as a consequence of its own heavy-handed powers, the Party knows only how to accumulate even more heavy-handed powers, and to use them maximally. And because it is completely unaccountable to law, or to an effective legislature, or to the people, there is no mechanism by which it can relinquish those powers, and no limits on its ability to expand them still further in the event of another “emergency”. There will be parts of the apparatus of the state that welcome lockdown and the permanent expansion of political power that lockdown brings. They have now learned what it takes to shut down an entire city of 26 million people in order to squeeze out undesirable elements (in this case, COVID-positive people).
Everything - and I mean everything - is processed and turned into a Party-controlled mechanism. They have done their best to present this assault on the basic human rights of an entire city’s population as some sort of benign process. It has, however, become increasingly sinister. Trying to divert the general discontent towards “foreign elements” is a particularly unwelcome (but wholly predictable) development.
Sunday May 1: Day 33
I LEARN also that our compound has been reclassified as a “prevention zone”, which means we can, in principle, wander outside. I did so, at 6.30. It was eerily quiet, patrolled by wary cats and elderly cleaners. The gates were still boarded up or clasped shut with coils of wire, just in case any of us had the audacity to try to make a break for it.
I went out again later in the day, and took photos of my neighbours enjoying their brief semblance of semi-freedom, washing cars and walking dogs.
Monday May 2: Day 34
THE DAY begins with another round of PCR tests. We wander back through the compound and I am alarmed - more than alarmed - by the ugliness of my reflection in the car windows.
I then spend most of the morning trying to find people who will deliver wine, water and bread to get us through what we hope to be the last leg of lockdown. Meanwhile, something sizzles behind my ribs.
Tuesday May 3: Day 35
I LISTEN to the comedian and actor Tim Key talking to Adam Buxton about the first lockdown in England, and how mad it all was. He refers to a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Tottenham Hotspur, when Harry Kane is also being told that the entire country is being shut down. “That is the mad thing about the lockdown - when you take a moment to consider that everyone did it,” Key says. Football superstar Harry Kane is having exactly the same mad conversation as the rest of us.
Wednesday May 4: Day 36
I HAVEN’T been paying attention to anything over the past few days apart from the snooker, and was gratified to learn this morning that the number of new daily infectees in Shanghai has plummeted, though not quickly or thoroughly enough to liberate us. This punitive lockdown has now lasted 35 days and one can almost guarantee that some of its harsh controls will be kept in place - all in the name of “epidemic prevention and control” - once we are allowed out again.
I take a walk around the inside perimeter of the compound. Shanghai’s Spring weather is warm and benign, but the residents are forced to spend their holiday hitching up makeshift badminton nets between the trees and nipping between the parked cars on their bicycles. A girl skips on a public square. A woman walks her scruffy three-legged brown dog.
Thursday May 5: Day 37
IN A madcap caper designed to use up our surplus of eggs, I spend the early morning cooking Yorkshire Puddings. I am amazed by the way the slivers of batter slink out of the tin and expand so promiscuously and polymorphously in the oven’s heat. It cheers me up.
I think about the role played by China’s residential committees not only in enforcing the lockdown, but in deciding how precisely the lockdown policies should be interpreted. We all have examples of elderly busybodies utterly delighted by this new opportunity to exert their emergency powers.
I came across a study saying that when one accounts for “confounding” elements like vaccination rates, Omicron is actually just as lethal as previous variants. I recall someone else - I don’t remember who - saying in the last few days that there is absolutely no reason why new variants should be less deadly than before. The key issue is always infectivity: the more contagious it is, the more it will spread and outcompete other strains.
This is all very depressing, of course. This is not just happening to me. This is and has been happening to billions. We do not even have the ability to enjoy the virtuousness of victimhood when the rest of the world is suffering too.
Friday May 6: Day 38
I GET up and walk three laps of the compound. I gaze at two lolling labradors, salivating with pure joy as they mooch through the bushes.
I watch my son struggling in one of his online classes, pulling all kinds of agonised faces into his screen.
Saturday May 7: Day 39
I TRY to take my mind away from the fact that we are caged by a techno-totalitarian state. There are rumours suggesting that the lockdown will end from tomorrow. I would be very surprised if that were the case.
We take a walk through the compound as the sun sets. Our neighbours walk their dogs, do their exercises, and gossip about the tribulations of lockdown. Their children ride their bikes and scooters. My son oohs and ahhs at the skinny street cats strutting through the gardens. A storm threatens to gather.
There is no sense of despair or discomfort. Everyone seems to be well-fed. Deliveries have been restored. But it is all so demeaning. Everyone understands that China’s zero-COVID strategy is basically a reflection of the ruling Party’s longstanding fear and distrust of the masses. Everyone understands that this is not a one-off, emergency situation brought about by a global pandemic: we all know the regime is exploiting and will continue to exploit this public health emergency to extend and hone its existing powers.
Caught up inside it all, we forget how extraordinary it is. I talk to my son about how difficult it must be for him, stuck here for five weeks with no one but me to talk to. It only occurs to me afterwards, once we get home, how difficult it must be for me too.
Monday May 9: Day 41
ON Twitter, foreign residents are sharing notices from their district government saying that they will be completely and comprehensively locked down for the next three days, with food deliveries also blocked. The cruelty and disregard for individual human welfare is astonishing. If this doesn't work, where does Shanghai go next?
Tuesday May 10: Day 42
IN the morning, after my early shift, we went for another test. The rest of the day was work and, well, irk. I write about two recent Chinese scientific papers telling the world that zero-COVID remains the correct approach, reciting the usual propaganda about the country’s unevenly distributed medical resources and its large proportion of unvaccinated elderly people.
The residents of entire floors and buildings are now being hauled off into quarantine because of a single infection, and the pandemic is still at the same “critical stage” it has been in for weeks. It seems to me that they are stepping up the controls in order to meet an arbitrary political target aimed at ending community infections by May 15.
Emergencies are good for authoritarian regimes. By now, they are so used to inflicting pain in the name of the Greater Good that more pain simply doesn’t matter. The feelings of the public simply don’t register because every official has to look upwards for approval - to the Shanghai Party Secretary, to Beijing, to the Central Committee, to the Supreme Leader.
In the end, it is simply the failure to respect human dignity that upsets me. It is the paternalistic Big Brother mentality of the Communist Party. It is the sense that we are all dispensible when it comes to the reputation of the Party and the honour of Xi Jinping. The idea that this pampered plutocrat knows more than anyone else about absolutely everything ought to be an insult to everyone’s intelligence, and yet, somehow, the entire political, economic and cultural system is configured solely on his behalf. It is wrong. It is morally, practically, categorically wrong.
Wednesday May 11: Day 43
A HITHERTO unnoticed CDC factotum by the name of Sun Xiaodong has a stab at defending the indefensible, telling reporters that it is perfectly legal for the city to drag people kicking and screaming into the quarantine centres just because one of their neighbours happened to test positive. Sun cited the infectious disease law, which apparently gives authorities carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want. A law that allows people to do whatever the hell they want isn’t really a law at all. Six weeks into this lockdown, the cruelty of the government has almost reached a state of self-parody.
Thursday May 12: Day 44
WE walk to our COVID test. My son hisses and seethes and harrumphs about how much he hates China. I worry I have created such a permissive atmosphere at home that he will feel comfortable telling all and sundry how much he believes the leaders are pompous oafs. I then think: what sort of country is this, that one could get into trouble for saying the leader is a pompous oaf?
Friday May 13: Day 45
DEPUTY mayor Wu Qing dares to talk of Shanghai “getting closer and closer to the light”, and discusses what Life after Lockdown might look like.
Community transmission is expected to reach zero in a few days, and Shanghai will be cautiously opened up thereafter, but there will also be more than 9,000 new rapid testing kiosks awaiting us outside subway stations, office blocks and shopping malls. This will be the new normal, and because it will be a damn sight better than our current misery, we will no doubt fully accept this further descent towards the techno-totalitarian dystopia of which the Chinese Communist Party has long dreamed.
I remember the burning, bitter resentment I felt whenever I was asked at the subway station to put my bag through the scanner. It got to the point when I would refuse even to carry a bag in order to avoid what I couldn’t help regarding as a humiliating intrusion into my privacy. But China’s obsession with COVID-19 has now propelled the Overton Window so far in the direction of intrusion that one is just grateful that one will be able to walk around in daylight again. If you’ve been chained to a radiator for a month, even hobbling about in manacles is a considerable improvement.
Monday May 16: Day 48
THERE is some suggestion that we are going to be allowed out very soon. But with severe restrictions likely to remain in place over the long term, and with testing stations now everywhere, I find myself thinking of that final episode of The Prisoner when Number 6 finally escapes from the Village, but we realise he is effectively still confined, still under surveillance, still served at his London home by the same sinister little butler, and still hearing the swish of the Village’s automatic doors. Lockdown is just a temporary manifestation of a wider and ever-expanding system of controls that aren’t going anywhere soon.
I wander the length and breadth of the compound and see the neighbours walking their dogs, doing their constitutionals, and wheeling their bulk deliveries back to their apartment. Bright white butterflies flutter through the bushes and a blackbird expostulates loudly from a high ledge. Summer is here and the pollen count is soaring, which means my son sneezed all the way along the queue for our latest COVID test this morning.
Someone knocks on our door and hands us cards that - ostensibly - allow us to leave the apartment block. I test it out and the guard gleefully refuses. “Tomorrow,” he says.
The assumption that I am supposed to be grateful after six weeks fills me with rage. The assumption that I am not even allowed to raise questions about how they are handling this also fills me with rage. The idea that there is no debate, that this is all the province of a small number of bumptious apparatchiks, fills me with rage.
This is a system designed - precision-engineered - to inflict the Party’s arbitrary power and impose unrealistic top-down strategies on the masses. We have a right to complain.
Wednesday May 18: Day 50
I GO for a walk and get into a row with the absurd little jobsworth at the gate, who tells me I am not allowed out of the compound until the afternoon. “Who decided? For what reason?” I shout these phrases and others like them, and to my great surprise, they finally yield, letting me through as soon as I present a green health code on my phone and a tatty rectangle of cardboard they have risibly described as an “exit-entry card”.
We are stuck in a dystopia, and with the hoops and hurdles so numerous, it has become more and more draining even to exercise the limited freedoms we have left. There doesn’t appear to be very much we can do about it, of course.
Thursday May 19: Day 51
I KEEP adapting Orwell’s famous line: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a swab stuck in a human throat forever.” We are summoned for yet another test, yet another line of miserable automatons shuffling to the same tent they’ve shuffled to twenty-odd times over the past month.
The use of technology to further strengthen the state’s ability to decide how we spend our days: this, for me, is the very definition of dystopia. None of these controls will ever be rolled back, even if they might seem a little more discreet once this absurd lockdown is finally lifted.
Friday May 20: Day 52
I GO for a long walk along Wanhangdu Road, tucked between Suzhou Creek on my left and Zhongshan Park on my right. I negotiated all the blocks, diversions and blue fences hitched up throughout my route with relative good humour. I got back at about 11.30 and just fiddled about for the rest of the day.
Saturday May 21: Day 53
I TAKE my son for a long ride through Shanghai, or at least our little part of it. We took the usual route to his school bus stop but then detoured on the way back, riding past the big (and now apparently empty) hospital on Xianxia Road. Meandering back, we stop off at Xinjing Town, which includes a little open parkway along the banks of a canal. Floating along the oily waters is a plastic bag of trash or takeaway that has somehow folded itself into the shape of a duck.
Old timers poke at their fishing rods and bellow at their neighbours on the opposite bank. For a moment, it feels like an prelapsarian oasis, a lively little throwback to pre-COVID times, but as we proceed along the towpath we encounter the ubiquitous police tape used to divide the community into easily manageable (and lockdownable) segments and to stop one building’s residents mixing with another’s.
On our travels today, there were some signs of life on Shanghai’s backstreets. Lianhua Supermarket has been allowed to reopen, and long queues snaked out of several branches, supervised as always by PPE-clad volunteers pointing furiously in a bid to police the distances between each customer.
Sunday May 22: Day 54
LATE in the evening we learn that after a brief relaxation of our lockdown that allowed us to pretend that we had returned to at least a semblance of normality, it is being tightened yet again. We are now only allowed to leave the compound twice in the next five days. I demand an explanation. Who is making these decisions? On what basis? I get no answer. I get into a bit of a rage. What the hell is going on? What is the end-game here?
Monday May 23: Day 55
IT goes on. As we endure yet more tests, one cannot help complaining about the absurdity of our lockdown, designed to curb an outbreak that has killed a few hundred very sick, very elderly people, many of whom - sheer actuarial logic would assume - would have died anyway.
Tuesday May 24: Day 56
I’M not entirely convinced by Gideon Rachman’s theory in The Age of the Strongman that Xi Jinping is somehow part of the same global trend towards authoritarian populism that saw the likes of Erdogan, Urban and Trump become leaders. I’m not entirely convinced the same forces that flow through Europe and the United States are allowed to filter through the political system here in China.
Still, there is no doubt that China has got considerably darker since Xi took charge. COVID-19 has accelerated China’s descent into a Stakhanovite techno-dystopia in which all that matters is Production, in which the Party is imbricated in every single aspect and on every single layer of human life, squeezing out every possible manifestation of individuality and turning everything into a node of its own system of power.
This is the world envisaged by Louis MacNiece in Prayer Before Birth:
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in the machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Thursday May 26: Day 58
WE go for yet another test in the late Spring drizzle. I loudly complain that we are all being treated like lab rats, but what difference does complaining make? The only solution to this is a personal one, and is to get out of here and never come back. So many people have already exercised this option.
I notice in our building’s WeChat group that the Building has decided to suspend all “entry-exit cards”. So, after restricting us to just two trips outside the compound in five days, they have now locked us down again completely, pending the results of the umpteenth round of tests. Everyone else seems perfectly sanguine about this. Everyone else seems to have accepted that this is a normal part of life.
Friday May 27: Day 59
IN the afternoon, we go out for a long ride. On the back of my scooter, my son helps me take videos of the empty mall forecourts. We enter a reopened park and watch eager teenagers playing frisbie on a lawn, and a trio of old ladies poking around in the flower bushes.
The authorities are preparing for a celebration. They will say how amazing Shanghai has been under the righteous command of the glorious Communist Party, comprehensively defeating the latest COVID-19 outbreak. They will say the war is not yet over, that there are more battles to come, because there is no way on earth they will voluntarily relinquish their controls over ordinary people.
Saturday May 28: Day 60
AFTER another test early this morning, we were locked in again. It seems they are now letting us out one day and then shutting us down and testing us the next, presumably as part of an experiment to determine how easy it is for us to bring SARS-CoV-2 back into the compound. It is so demeaning.
Twitter is ablaze with videos of young people defying the police and ditching their masks and revelling on Anfu Road. Some complain they are spreading disease, but most of us are saying, good for them. Thank God there are still signs that this very damaged city still has the capacity to act spontaneously and without the permission of the Party.
I’m not saying that every one of us has an absolute right to what we wish for. I am saying everyone one of us at the very least deserves a space for ourselves, a space that belongs to us, and to us alone. In China, under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, people understood that within reason at least, we had this space. Now, in China, there are no reassurances. There are no protections.
