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The country’s strict coronavirus restrictions dictate living patterns, such as queuing for common Covid tests and stocking up on extra groceries in case of lockdown.
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By Vivian Wang
SHENZHEN, China – Signs of a lockdown to close in Shenzhen, China, have been building for some time. The city had been recording some coronavirus infections for days. Daily Covid testing had to happen almost anywhere. Individual buildings had been cordoned off.
So when a hotel worker woke me up a little after 7 a. m. To tell me that we couldn’t faint for 4 days, my initial disorientation temporarily turned into resignation.
Of course, this happened. Me in China
As the rest of the world lifts more and more restrictions every day, China’s regulations are becoming more consolidated, as are pandemic living patterns under a government that insists on getting rid of cases. People plan lunch breaks around mandatory testing. Restructure routes to minimize the number of fitness checkpoints along the way.
A sense of imaginable disaster still looms, driven by reports in Shanghai and other cities, where sudden lockdowns have left citizens without food or medicine. A friend bought an instant freezer so she could do an inventory of groceries.
Yet the policies have been in place for so long, and with so little sign of easing, that navigating them is, if not general, at least routine. I know which test site nearby returns effects faster and which grocery store doesn’t. Check if you have recorded your long-term touch tracking.
The disruptor becomes typical; what was once unimaginable. The pandemic has imposed new rituals around the world, but in China the extremes make this procedure all the more worrying.
The most shocking aspects, for me, were the technological ones. China under “zero Covid” is a network of virtual codes. In front of every public area (restaurants, apartment complexes, even public restrooms) is a published QR code that other people will have to scan with their phones to register their visit. They also all have a non-public fitness code, which uses verification and location history effects to assign a color. Green is good. Yellow or red, and you may be sent to quarantine.
However, what determines the color of your code is confusing. When a banking scandal triggered prochecks in Henan province this year, officials manipulated the proficiency codes of procheckers to prevent them from meeting. On August morning, when a colleague and I were scheduled to fly from the southern city of Guangzhou to Shanghai, his code suddenly turned yellow, without explanation, meaning he couldn’t get on the plane. if we take daily checks for two weeks). He did, a little an hour before takeoff.
Testing sites are plentiful, at least, as the government has mandated that they be within a 15-minute walk in cities. And they are easily identifiable even from a distance. They regularly have a queue, which can be long at lunchtime or after work. Many also have their own soundtrack: a pre-recorded voice that commands other people to stay a meter apart, shouting through a looping megaphone.
On hot days, other people wait 30 minutes, with the mask stuck to the skin through sweat. This summer, in the city of Chongqing, citizens took cover as forest fires raged nearby. The night I landed in Shanghai, the government issued a typhoon warning and ordered the skyline, adding the iconic Pearl Tower, to go dark due to a power outage. I curled up with dozens of other people in a control row under the umbrellas.
Some features of Covid-era China testify to human creativity. The Guangzhou Library offers e-book sterilization machines, which resemble high-tech refrigerators. Manufacturers of private protective appliances have designed private air conditioning units, which inflate the dangerous attacks of medical workers with fresh air while conducting hours of mass testing.
My favorite invention is the “temporary quarantine zone,” where a potential physical health threat can be left in public until medical attention arrives. Many of those spaces seem more pro forma than designed to prevent transmission. Some are tents in construction lobbies. Some are corners with folding chairs. Near Beijing’s largest park, one is a bounded outdoor section.
It’s imaginable to avoid endless checks, just without going anywhere. In a part of Guangzhou dominated by mazes of small-scale textile factories, an employee told me he hadn’t seen the city’s checkout requirement to leave the district. And his friends rarely left him anyway, sleeping in dormitories near factories and lazing around in a nearby lemon tea shop through his days off. .
The economic effects of the restrictions have been harder to ignore. He had been stuck in several blockages, leaving him unable to paint for weeks. Still, jobs were scarcer, because fewer people were buying clothes. in the lemon tea shop.
Signs of slowdown are everywhere. Taxi drivers are offering spontaneous tests of traffic flow. In the food court near me in Beijing, many stalls were left in the dark, leaving diners at surviving outlets to eat in a terrifying half-glow.
And 0 Covid prices are not limited to lost jobs. When my hotel in Shenzhen closed, they said we had to pay for our extended stays ourselves.
I controlled to escape the confinement before. As the afternoon progressed, my colleague and I, who were meeting, saw other people coming out through a staff exit. Under repeated harassment, the staff at the main table admitted that we could leave, if we discovered a stall willing to take us in. despite our history in a lockdown zone. In less than 20 minutes we were on our way to the exercise station.
This is what you have to get used to: absolute arbitrariness. You’re locked up, until someone decides you’re not.
You can pass all the required tests and be perfectly fit, but your fitness code can still turn yellow.
For many Chinese, the past few years of the pandemic have awakened the spectrum of feelings ranging from anger to frustration to grief. But the first word many other people hear, when I ask them how they feel, is helplessness.
“What’s the point of getting angry?” said a single mother in Shenzhen, who had been locked up several times and was afraid to pay her son’s school fees. It wouldn’t replace anything.
Others take a look to regain some sense of control, however small. A woman I met in Shanghai gave her neighbor a space key, so she can feed her cat if she gets stuck in an instant quarantine. People send screenshots of the above check effects to inattentive security guards.
The Chinese are an inexhaustible reservoir of black humor about Covid rules, especially from other people who know the harshest conditions. A user in Xinjiang recently posted a video titled “They Sent Us Tools for Quarantine,” in which he slammed a hard cookie against a table to the beat of an electronic beat. When citizens of Chengdu city emptied grocery outlets before the city lockdown, social media users jokingly made posters that the government had announced a Black Friday-style grocery shopping holiday.
I was moved and intimidated a little bit by how other people learned to overcome pain. However, I remember a warning, or a plea, written by a professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, against the habit of this. circumscribed form of life.
“Don’t let the widespread epidemic and economic recession make you give up your dreams or lower your expectations,” Professor Lao Dongyan wrote in an essay widely shared on Chinese social media before it was censored this year. “We have to adjust and adaptarnos. al outdoor environment, but not by doing that. “
This week, when I went to the checkpoint outside my workplace for my normal pickup, I saw that the station, which in the past closed at 6:30 p. m. M. , was now open 24 hours a day. I was excited, until I got a sense of what I was celebrating precisely.
Li You contributed to the research.
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