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Sunday, November 27, 2022

Zero-Covid

Protestors in Shanghai hold a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Urumqi fire. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Well, let me start out by saying Shanghai is doing fine, ie, we don't have any large-scale lockdowns going on right now. (Though I'm sure there are individual buildings or apartment complexes in lockdown in Shanghai at the moment.)

But there's a lot of ****ed-up stuff going on elsewhere in China, and today I just feel really exhausted and overwhelmed, hearing about it all. 

I feel like, I'm not able to give you readers a totally accurate overview of everything (ie, how many cities are currently having lockdowns) because it's too emotionally hard searching all that information out and trying to figure out what's really going on. But anyway, I'll write down what I know in this blog post.

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Shanghai

First of all, here's the graph of recent covid case numbers in Shanghai:

Graph that shows number of daily local covid cases in Shanghai. Recently the number has been increasing, and 130 cases were reported on November 26. Image source.

Uh, the way that graph increases is kinda scary. As far as I know, though, the vast majority of the local covid cases in Shanghai recently are people who just entered Shanghai from other Chinese cities.

So, last time I talked about the policy changes announced by the Chinese national government, which scaled back the restrictions that we all have to live with due to zero-covid. Because of these changes, our apartment complex cancelled the "mandatory" mass testing, and the schools are only testing the kids on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, instead of every school day.

Ah, but then in Shanghai, a totally new rule was announced: If you have entered Shanghai within the past 5 days, you are not allowed to go out to restaurants/ malls/ those kind of fun entertainment places. You are allowed to go to your job, take the subway, and go to boring places like banks.

Some links about it, from SHINE:

Public venue ban for travelers to city but transport, banks exempt (November 22)

White list planned for frequent cross-provincial commuters (November 24)

Blue code introduced in Hunan's health code system (November 25) This article is about Hunan province, which has a policy similar to the one Shanghai has. In Hunan, if you've been there less than 5 days, your health code will be blue.

The way this works is, if you've been in Shanghai less than 5 days, your health code will still be green, but it will have the words “来沪返沪不满5天” ["Less than 5 days since entering Shanghai"] under it. And so, when entering a mall or restaurant, there should be a security guard there checking everyone's health codes, and they won't let you in if it says you've been in Shanghai less than 5 days.

Oh, and then they announced there will be a "white list" for people who frequently travel in and out of Shanghai, so this rule won't apply to them. For example, there are people who live outside of Shanghai but commute in for work every day.

My feeling about this is, it seems like less of a "zero covid" rule and more of a "living with covid" rule, for the following reasons:

  • How is this going to be enforced? The security guards at the malls / the waiters at restaurants are gonna enforce it? Like, of all the people who are supposed to be enforcing the zero-covid rules, it's the mall security guards who care the least. Most times, customers can just walk in and vaguely point their phone screen in the security guard's general direction, but it's not like the security guard is actually taking the time to make sure you really scanned the location code and that's really your health code and not a screenshot from someone else. (Probably there are lots of people walking around Shanghai with a screenshot of a green health code that they took in June, and no one has noticed.) Perhaps the idea isn't that it's really possible to keep newly-arriving people out of malls- perhaps it's just to let everyone know that if you do sneak into a mall when you're not supposed to (which is really quite easy), and then you turn out to be covid-positive, you're going to get arrested for that. 
    Anyway, since it can't really be enforced, it doesn't feel like a "zero covid" rule to me.
  • It's only the "fun" sorts of places that are being restricted. People who just arrived in Shanghai are still allowed to take public transportation, go to work, etc. My feeling about this is, those "fun" places are where it's more likely to be crowded, where people will not be wearing masks, and so contact tracing is difficult... I've heard of situations where some covid-positive person went to a few bars, and thousands of people were then labelled "close contacts" just because they had been to those same bars on that day. Whereas, if you go to work in an office, it's just your colleagues who are there. It's not hundreds of people coming and going throughout the entire day. And on public transportation, everyone wears masks and doesn't talk to each other, so probably covid won't spread there.
    So this new rule is specifically targeting places which are non-essential, and where there's the most potential for covid to spread. It's not trying to make the spread 0 (to make it 0, you would have to keep the newly-arriving people in quarantine in hotels or at home for 5 days), but it's trying to stop it from happening in places where it could potentially cause a big outbreak/ a contact-tracing nightmare.

Anyway, I think the reason for this new rule is that A LOT of other cities in China are having bad outbreaks/lockdowns right now, and Shanghai is not. So Shanghai is trying to stop that from happening here. And actually, I have heard this past week that a bunch of cities in China now have policies like this- if you've arrived within the past 3-5 days, you're not allowed to go to malls/restaurants/etc.

But. What about the US consulate?

Ah, see, here's the thing. The US consulate in Shanghai is inside a mall. (Westgate Mall, near West Nanjing Road.) There's like, some office space in the top floors of this mall, and that's where the US consulate is. 

So it seems like the consulate is in the category of places you should still be allowed to go to, even if you've been in Shanghai less than 5 days. But, are the mall security guards on the first floor going to let you in?

My feeling on it is, if you walk around to the different entrances of the mall, surely you can find a security guard who's not really paying attention, and you can get in that way. Or, yeah, just use a screenshot of a health code that doesn't have the "less than 5 days" message. (But you might go to jail for that if you turn out to be covid-positive. If you're covid-negative then you're fine.) Or, perhaps if you show them paperwork that proves you really have things you need to get done at the consulate, they will let you in anyway.

The US consulate itself has been, um, not all that helpful during the pandemic. Their general attitude is, "Hey, if you're an American in China, we want to let you know, China is setting up all these restrictions because of covid, and that's not any of our business, but just want to let you know we probably can't help you if you're having a problem related to that." Like, I'm on their email list, and every few months they send out an email that says that. [Perhaps what I've written here is a slight paraphrase.] 

And then, a few days ago, they sent out an email that says, "Yeah, so Shanghai now has this rule about you can't go to malls if you've been here less than 5 days, and the US consulate is in a mall, so they might not let you in, and that's not any of our business, but hey if you do manage to make it up to the 9th floor, we are open!" [Slight paraphrase.]

Yeah, not that helpful. 

Better to put your faith in the underpaid mall security guards who don't care about their job, rather than the US consulate. 

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Shijiazhuang

On November 14, Shijiazhuang 石家庄 (a city near Beijing) announced that the free nucleic-acid testing locations would be closed, and people would no longer be required to show a negative test result in order to enter public places. This happened even though there were something like 500 covid cases reported in Shijiazhuang the previous day. 

This was all over Chinese social media. People were saying that this is a sign that zero-covid is ending- that Shijiazhuang is no longer doing zero-covid, and soon the rest of the country will follow. I heard that people in Shijiazuang were all scared to go out, they're buying all the medicine from the pharmacies, they're all keeping their kids home from school, etc. (That's what I heard on WeChat, but I have no way to fact-check it, so we don't really know what the situation is there.)

A day or so later, some of this was reversed. Now the free nucleic acid testing stations are opening again, and parts of Shijiazhuang are in lockdown.

So, uh, that didn't last long.

I'm looking for English-language news articles about this, but I haven't found any that I love... all of these read as quite biased to me, or from a news organization I'm not familiar with so I can't vouch for its accuracy, but anyway, you can read them and kind of get an overall idea:

Financial Times: Chinese city tiptoes away from zero-Covid (November 15) 

SHINE: Shijiazhuang to reopen free PCR testing sites (November 15)

The Times of India: Shijiazhuang: Fear and panic grips Chinese city rumored to be exiting Covid Zero (November 16)

Bloomberg: Covid Zero Returns to Chinese City Rumored to Be Reopening (November 21) This article is paywalled, so who knows what it says, but the headline seems right to me.

China Daily: Shijiazhuang continues testing as case counts climb (November 25) 

Honestly this idea that "oh Shijiazhuang tried to back off of zero-covid but everyone was terrified and hated it" reads as Chinese government propaganda to me. I'm very curious about what the actual situation was.

But I'll say one thing: Yes, Chinese people are very scared of covid. For 3 years, it's been this scary thing that we've never actually seen (it's probably still true that the majority of Chinese people don't know anyone who has had covid) but has completely changed our lives, making all these rules to control us. And the government needs people to believe that covid itself is worse than all the suffering that's happened due to lockdowns.

Chinese people are very much not emotionally/psychologically ready to "live with covid." But the good thing is, most of us are vaccinated, and we have good mask-wearing habits. But there needs to be more education about what specific actions do or do not decrease one's risk of getting covid. Like, randomly spraying disinfectant everywhere! Being racist! [link is about monkeypox, but a similar idea would apply to covid] These are things that don't actually do anything to reduce the risk of getting covid.

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Urumqi

[content note: fire, death]

SHINE: 10 killed, 9 injured in Xinjiang residential building fire (November 25) I include SHINE here to give you the Chinese-government-propaganda view. Never forget SHINE is a propaganda rag! (Yes I put a lot of SHINE links in this post; as you read them, please keep in mind that SHINE is a propaganda rag. [Insert meme "Tell me you lived through the Shanghai lockdown without telling me you lived through the Shanghai lockdown"])

AP News: 10 killed in apartment fire in northwest China’s Xinjiang (November 26)

CNN: China’s Urumqi to ease Covid lockdown amid public anger over deadly fire (November 27)

BBC: China Xinjiang: Urumqi rocked by Covid lockdown protests after deadly fire (November 27)

ABC: Shanghai hit by protests as anger at zero-COVID and Urumqi fire spreads across China (November 27)

BBC: Covid protests widen in China after Urumqi fire (November 27)

Yahoo! News: Shanghai residents hold vigil for Urumqi fire victims (November 26)

Urumqi is a city in Xinjiang province, in western China. (Some background information- A lot of ethnic minorities and/or Muslims live there, and the Chinese government sort of has a reputation for not caring as much about their rights...) They've been having lockdowns there for a long time, and recently there was a fire in an apartment building, and firetrucks were blocked from getting in by the fences and/or parked cars that were there because of lockdown. And people are mad. 

And there's lots of stuff posted about it on WeChat, and lots of stuff getting censored. Like, I am kind of getting the impression, from rumors on WeChat today, that we haven't heard the full story about the protest in Shanghai. There is a rumor that a lot of people got arrested- but I have no idea if that's true, it's just something I saw on WeChat. It's impossible to fact-check when the government is censoring the actual truth.

I have to say, personally, I feel really proud of the Chinese people who are protesting. This kind of protesting doesn't really happen in China- but now we've been seeing it more and more because of what's happened with zero-covid. And they can't censor it fast enough.

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What other cities are having lockdowns?

Off the top of my head, here are the cities I've been hearing about having lockdowns this week: Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shijiazhuang, Lanzhou, Urumqi, Wuhan, Hohhot. And surely there are more. Sometimes a lockdown is just a few days, and sometimes it's weeks and weeks.

When we were in lockdown in Shanghai (for 2 and a half months) we said "This is the 2nd-worst lockdown China has had." The worst was, obviously, the initial Wuhan lockdown in early 2020. But at this point, some of these other cities are having worse lockdowns/ longer lockdowns than Shanghai did.

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Feelings about zero-covid

Well, for a long time I've felt like "zero-covid will end eventually, and I don't want to be in China when it happens." How does this end? Violence?

It's been almost 3 years now... and for most of that time, we were fine. We benefitted a lot from the zero-covid policy, because it meant we could just live our normal lives and go places and didn't have to worry about getting covid. We had to wear masks and follow various rules, but there was very little risk of actually getting infected with covid. And that was good.

But at this point, a lot of China's population has suffered through lockdowns. At what point do we realize, most of us aren't benefitting from zero-covid any more, we need to do something different?

I've heard people say, Shanghai will not try to do a large-scale lockdown again, because the people of Shanghai just will not tolerate it. The trust in the government is just gone. We're not going to submit to that again.

And let's definitely not do what the US did! Like, don't just give up and end all restrictions and say covid doesn't matter any more! There are better options than that.

Anyway... don't worry about me, though. For now, Shanghai is fine. We aren't in lockdown now.

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Other links:

Sixth Tone

China’s Hottest Art Show Is in the Middle of Nowhere. Literally. (November 17) "For another work, Meng mixed rhythmic music produced by a friend with a recording of the mechanical alarm that loudly declared, 'Please note, you have entered the monitoring area,' any time there was activity in the aisle that linked quarantine rooms."

SHINE

48-hour PCR report required to eateries, malls (November 27) Wow, this is a big change- now we will have to get tested every 2 days instead of every 3 days if we want to be able to go to restaurants etc.

Free PCR tests to end of December over new resurgence (November 26)

Tourist attractions change entry requirements in response to COVID situation (November 26) It seems like the main change is now they require you to have a negative nucleic acid result from within the past 48 hours, rather than 72 hours.

Four new community cases traced to popular ocean park and zoo (November 25)

Woman under investigation for hiding positive PCR test result (November 24) Yeah in China you will get into legal trouble if you are covid-positive and try to hide it.

About Shanghai Disneyland:

Related to the big changes in the zero-covid policies, which I wrote about last time:

Xinhua

China Focus: China pledges to implement optimized COVID-19 response measures (November 17) This all sounds very nice, but is it going to actually happen in reality?

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