Visitors to Shanghai’s Disney resort were trapped inside for the second time in 12 months after authorities and operators announced a sudden lockdown as part of China’s strict pandemic response.
In a repeat of scenes from across Covid-zero China, viral videos on Monday appeared to show guests rushing to the locked gates of the theme park in an attempt to escape the lockdown. It followed extraordinary scenes on the weekend, with a mass escape of employees from a locked-down Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, to walk up to hundreds of kilometres to their hometowns.
The Disney resort, which includes Disneyland and shopping districts, announced shortly after 11.30am that it was immediately closing the theme park and surrounding areas in compliance with Covid regulations. On WeChat the Shanghai government said all people were barred from entering or exiting the park, with those still inside needing to be tested and show a negative result before being allowed to leave.
Anyone who had visited the park since 27 October would need to test for the virus three times in three days, it said.
Videos shared across social media showed people not long afterwards crowding around the park gates. One clip showed an employee telling trapped guests that shops and amusements were still running inside the park, and he would inform them if there were any updates, as a colleague locked the gate behind him.
The park was also closed for two days last November with more than 30,000 visitors stuck inside, after authorities ordered all of them to be tested.
China’s commitment to containing and controlling every outbreak has led to hugely disruptive lockdowns of sites ranging from individual buildings to entire counties. Across cities and provinces movement has been curtailed, with hundreds of millions under lockdown and estimates of hundreds of thousands of people sent into regional quarantine centre for being infectious, a close contact, or a relatively distant neighbour.
Shanghai reported just 10 local cases on Saturday. China reported 479 confirmed cases and more than 2,200 asymptomatic cases nationally on Monday.
The two high-profile lockdowns were the latest signs of growing discontent among some Chinese people with the increasingly disruptive restrictions imposed suddenly in places across the country, sometimes due to just a handful of cases. Social media posts over recent months have depicted scores of shoppers and office workers fleeing buildings, sometimes overwhelming security to get away before they are locked in.
The Apple-supplier Foxconn has not disclosed the number of infected workers, nor the number who have left, but said on Sunday that it would not stop them from departing after hundreds of employees on Saturday appeared to begin fleeing the world’s largest iPhone factory, some scaling the fences to escape. The Taiwan-headquartered manufacturer has about 200,000 people at its Zhengzhou complex, which includes dormitory accommodation for workers.
The mass departures came amid reports of fear over the outbreak and complaints of poor living conditions and inadequate Covid responses, two weeks into a “closed-loop” system of operating began. Local officials on Monday rejected claims that conditions had become unliveable, and that the company had arranged transport for those who wanted to go home.
The official also said the situation was now under control and production was continuing, but an insider told Reuters there were fears the factory’s production of iPhones could drop by 30% next month.
The exodus has prompted nearby cities to draw up plans for isolating the migrant workers returning to their home towns. In a show of support, residents along nearby travel routes left bottled water and provisions next to roads with signs such as: “for Foxconn workers returning home”, according to social media posts.
“Some people were walking amid wheat fields with their luggage, blankets and quilts,” wrote a user of WeChat in a post about the social media images. “I couldn’t help but feel sad.”
Many residents had hoped that the zero-Covid policy might be eased after last week’s Communist party congress, the most important meeting of China’s five-year political cycle. But instead the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, reiterated his commitment to the pandemic response for the indefinite future.
The policy has been damaging to China’s economy and social fabric, but health experts and Chinese officials have said that allowing the virus to spread among the 1.4 billion residents would be disastrous, with potentially hundreds of millions of deaths.
There is little prior infection in China, large numbers of elderly people remain unvaccinated and the health system is geographically inequitable and would be unable to cope, they said.
Additional research by Xiaoqian Zhu
