At six o’clock each morning there is a changing of the guard. Alarm clocks go off and citizens looking to feed their families madly tap at screens hoping to secure a delivery spot on a grocery app. Meanwhile, netizens battling government censors to tell the real story call it a night. In Shanghai today, both resistance and survival are virtual.
What began as a two-stage, four-day lockdown in China’s biggest city is now into its fourth week, as officials battle to contain the city’s worst Covid surge to date, driven by the highly-contagious Omicron variant. There are currently more than 21,000 Covid cases among Shanghai’s 25 million residents, and no clear timeline for the lockdown lifting, leaving rich and poor, locals and foreigners united in a quest for survival and information in a way I haven’t seen in my more than a decade as a journalist in the city.
Public criticism of government policies is unusual in China, and much of it censored, but alarming stories over the last month stories are being shared widely. There are food and medication shortages, workers at companies including Tesla are being forced to sleep in their factories overnight to reduce transmission, and elderly people have died inside the city’s cabin hospitals, described as Covid concentration camps for their cramming of thousands of positive cases into isolation wards with poor conditions. Officials say that Omicron has not caused any deaths among Shanghai’s infected residents, but unofficial tallies show that at least 172 residents have died under the brutal quarantine measures, including vulnerable people whose treatments were delayed.
Measures were stepped up further this weekend. In recent days, pictures have started emerging of workers in white hazmat suits installing two-metre green fences outside housing blocks designated as “sealed areas” where at least one person has tested positive for Covid, to stop people leaving.
For residents like me, the announcement for this lockdown came suddenly. After battling a rising wave of Omicron cases in March the Shanghai government announced on the evening of March 27 that from 3am the following day the Pudong area would be in a four-day quarantine. Shanghai is bisected by the Huangpu River into Pudong and Puxi, which translate to the east and west of the Huangpu. Those in Pudong had around an hour to scrabble food supplies before shops closed.
April Fool’s Day marked the start of Puxi’s turn at a four-day lockdown. The day before, I’d got up at 7am, hunting down meagre supplies and returning with a bag full of cauliflowers, carrots and other vegetables, having spent nearly RMB100 (£11) - more than double the usual price, and enough to last me a bit over the four days. As we discovered on April 1, the joke was on us - a few hours after Puxi went into lockdown at 3am, Pudong should have had its lockdown lifted, but it never happened.
For many Shanghai residents, their lockdowns began much earlier than March 28 or April 1. Throughout March, most housing compounds had lockdowns. I was one of the lucky ones with my compound only having a two-day closure. A friend in Pudong, a retired civil servant, recently posted on WeChat (China’s Whatsapp that also has a social feed) that he was on Day 39 of his lockdown and, after eleven PCR tests, still negative.
Citywide lockdowns increased restrictions further. Suddenly we were confined to our apartments, no longer free to wander around our compounds. All transportation was suspended and although delivery riders were meant to stay operating, the confusion of the early days meant this didn’t really happen. More than ever, we became reliant on the delivery of meals and groceries, but the system broke under the restrictions.
Quickly, life under lockdown has become a virtual one. It is very difficult to get a full picture of what is happening in Shanghai other than the snippets gained from posts shared on WeChat, Weibo (China’s Twitter) and, for those with access to a VPN, Twitter itself. What is apparent from these posts and conversations with friends is that there’s a growing anger, war weariness and discontent.
Shanghai, a municipality with a population of over 25 million, is China’s most populous and richest city, but for residents today the main preoccupation is the hunt for food. From April 2 the government started delivering food to compounds, but the quality, quantity and frequency have varied widely and no account is taken as to how many people are in a household.
In three weeks I have received three government handouts. The last one I was sent included rice and cooking oil, other households recently received laundry detergent and soap - leading us to question how long this will all be going to go on for. Government rations are not enough and largely consist of vegetables such as mooli, potatoes, cucumbers and - if you’re lucky - some meat.
During the first two weeks it was near impossible to secure a delivery slot on grocery-buying apps due to the shortage of delivery riders and sheer demand. To be successful required booking at around 6am and quick reflexes, meaning people were reliant on the government handouts and what they managed to stock up with before the lockdown.
Compounds have subsequently found more success by group ordering supplies. Over the last week my building has secured meat, vegetables, bananas, cakes, Coke, milk tea and Starbucks. Still, preparing a meal is like receiving a mystery bag on Ready Steady Cook - everyone is sharing recipes and tips on what to do with the limited supplies available. Saying that, the food situation is markedly better than in the first two weeks, most likely thanks to group buying. It seems also that companies such as Jingdong are now getting more delivery riders and are able to do more personal orders.
While food remains an underlying worry, the real fear lies with testing positive and being taken to a fangcang yiyuan: a square cabin hospital with no medical treatment - merely a place to concentrate Covid positive cases in camps and isolate them from the rest of the population. Even conditions in the higher quality camps are poor at best, with thousands crammed together. Elderly people have reportedly died inside after admittance, despite not being counted as Covid deaths. Most of the more than 300,000 cases reported since March have ended up in such camps. A Corgi was beaten to death after following its owner to a bus taking them to a camp. Thankfully this seems an isolated case, but people worry what will happen to their pets if they’re taken away.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has yet to visit crisis-hit Shanghai, but CCTV news reporting on comments he made while visiting the military in Hainan said “Persistence is victory. Adhere to people above all else, life above all else, adhere to the prevention of imported cases, a rebound of domestic cases, adhere to scientific precision, dynamic zero-COVID.”
People in Shanghai are quickly reaching the conclusion that zero-Covid is equal to zero-plan. Dissenters engage in a continual game of cat and mouse with censors scoring victories overnight only to see posts taken down during the day. One of the most recently banned hashtags was the first line of the national anthem “Stand up! Those who refuse to be slaves.” Saturday saw a sea of content in WeChat feeds removed and the censoring of Voices of April, a moving video featuring snippets from conversations recorded in Shanghai during the month. The video went viral on Friday and its deletion has created even more anger.
Many are beyond caring about government threats and are sharing posts such as a recording with Zhu Weiping, an epidemiologist working in Pudong, who said the Omicron response was politicised rather than based on medical need. Another widely shared is an essay simply entitled ‘Help’ from the blogger Storm Zhang, despairing at the food situation. WeChat feeds over the last few days have been filled with the Les Misérables song ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’, which is rapidly becoming an anthem for the Shanghai situation.
State propaganda has hit back with scenes of shoppers in a well-stocked supermarket, with netizens joking it deserves an Oscar. Later it emerged it was filmed in Jinshan, a relatively unaffected district - the equivalent of filming in Croydon and claiming it was central London.
There are, though, some rays of hope. Since April 11 compounds have been placed into three categories: precautionary, controlled, and lockdown. Those in the precautionary category are allowed out within their district and those like my compound under the controlled category allow residents to wander within the compound. While many financial companies forced employees to sleep in their offices to remain open, 666 factories have now been given the green light to resume production using a closed-loop system. This notably includes Tesla, where workers will need to sleep in the factory.
There is still no clear timeline for when it will end and people feel as if they’ve been Shanghaied. On Sunday, workers started putting up fences in parts of the city, often barricading people into their homes in what’s being described as a hard lockdown. The internet has responded with the Chinese characters for Shanghai written with a fence.
A recent survey showed that 85 per cent of foreigners were rethinking their futures in the city, with almost half planning to leave within the next year. But it’s not just expats. Within the last week a well-connected, UK-educated businessman told me of his plans to go to Singapore and a single mother who has never left China is also talking of emigrating.
Whenever (if) it ever reaches Covid-zero, Shanghai will be a changed city. We’ll never forget that the gates to our compounds while keeping others out, can just as easily make us prisoners.
*Ed Tucker is writing under a pseudonym for safety reasons
