Locked down in Shanghai, I’ve caught a glimpse of our techno-dystopian future
Rotting cabbage, digital breadlines and bossy drones
Apr 26th 2022
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By Don Weinland
Inever imagined living through history could be this boring. At the end of March, the Chinese government responded to an outbreak of the Omicron variant in Shanghai by embarking on the largest city-wide lockdown in history.
Most of Shanghai’s 25m residents are shut in their homes or sleeping on the floor of their workplaces. Police cars idle down boulevards that were once bustling thoroughfares. Occasionally buses full of masked passengers, ostensibly heading to vast, makeshift covid hospitals on the outskirts of the city, zip past on the motorway below.
I moved to Shanghai at the beginning of March. Trapped inside my hotel room, it’s hard to tell what’s going on in the smoggy ghostopolis. In this mass experiment – one in which government disclosures are incomplete or deceptive – any small bit of information that you can verify with your own eyes becomes vital. Monitoring the number of cars on the road, or the thickness of the haze of pollution against the skyline, become vital, if imperfect, gauges of human traffic and economic activity.
A government announcement at one point claimed that nearly half the population of the city had been set free (this seems implausible). At the same time the media reported that whole communities were being hauled out of Shanghai to give authorities time to “sanitise” specific areas (more likely). Residents of Shanghai have been pushed into an inner world largely playing out on smartphone screens.
Buses full of masked passengers heading to makeshift covid hospitals whisk past on the motorway
Across Chinese social media, the story of the lockdown has been typed out in a kind of disappearing, digital ink. People take to their phones and computers to rant about food shortages or medical disasters, or to post footage of large protests, only to see their complaints scrubbed from the internet by China’s army of censors. For a time, the word “Shanghai” became unsearchable, as if the Communist Party was pretending the city didn’t exist as long as it was rife with covid. The loudest protests have found new life in memes and cryptic slogans before being washed away in another wave of “harmonisation”, local internet slang for the government’s erasure of dissent.
Shanghai residents are capturing the humour and horror of the experience in their own way. Start with the basics of survival: procuring food. Chinese shopping apps have a function called “group-buying”, which in normal times means people can club together and save money by buying in bulk. In the chaos of the lockdown, this has become one of the only ways to receive a delivery of vegetables or meat. For anyone wondering what a techno-dystopian future might look like, this may offer a clue. Scoring meals can mean hours of monitoring your phone: with tens of thousands of people trying to purchase the same small quantity of goods at any one time, quick typing, fervent refreshing and repeated pressing of “buy” buttons are essential. Digital breadlines form, with many ending up empty-handed as supplies run out in seconds.
In online-shopping lingo, the organiser of a group-buying circle is called a tuanzhang. The word has taken on a new meaning among Chinese netizens after an anecdote about Shanghai’s top Communist Party chief, Li Qiang, was shared online. Speaking to locals during the lockdown, the politician was allegedly confused about group-buying and wondered aloud what a tuanzhang did. The term is now used in a tongue-in-cheek way to mock how out of touch the Communist Party is with regular folk.
Chinese state media has heralded the Shanghai lockdown as “trailblazing”. It often marvels at the technological wonders of drones and robotic dogs that blast messages over loudspeakers to the city’s captives. As officials congratulated themselves on their handling of the response, a video shared online showed a drone telling residents to “suppress your souls’ urges for freedom”.
But public anger at the government seems to be mounting. Videos circulating online show elderly people behind gates, begging for food. Men in goggles and white hazmat suits are seen beating people who have not complied with rules. Some people now refer to these lockdown enforcers as bai weibing, or White Guards, a play on the Red Guards who terrorised China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.
Parcels of vegetables arrive unexpectedly at my door. Some are government handouts in big styrofoam crates; others are ones I’ve managed to order. Many are already rotten by the time they reach me. One package was infested with moths that fluttered around the lamps in my room for days. The sulphurous odour of rotting cabbage has become familiar. It is an apt metaphor for the city’s predicament. The slang phrase bailan, or “left to rot”, has become common on social media. The implication is that this sophisticated metropolis has fallen into the wrong hands and stopped functioning.
Scoring meals on a food-delivery app means quick typing, fervent refreshing and repeated pressing of “buy” buttons
When the lockdown was announced, millions of people had just hours to prepare. It was launched without considering how the elderly or disabled would pass the weeks in isolation, where cancer and diabetes patients would receive life-saving medication and treatment, or how long it would take pregnant women to get to hospital.
Tens of thousands of businesses were closed without thinking how employees would get through the month without a pay-cheque or how company owners could pay the rent. Countless residents struggled to find basic provisions as cabbage and pork loins rotted on the shelves.
Fewer still were prepared to be carted off to the mass-quarantine facilities that are masquerading as hospitals. Many people have died as a result of not being able to access medical treatment for conditions other than covid, but avoiding covid deaths has been the only thing that mattered to officials.
The Communist Party sees this single-mindedness as a quality that allows it to blast through obstacles in its path. But it has also rendered politicians strikingly unaware of how sentiment in the city has shifted in recent weeks. In a letter to guests, a hotel in my district boldly remarked, “Covid is not the thing we are afraid of; it’s [government] policy.”
For some of the hotel’s older staff, the situation has sparked painful memories. I spoke to an employee in his early 60s who has been living in the hotel for weeks, away from his wife. Normally a cheerful man, when asked about the lockdown he only mumbles under his breath that “they” – the party – “don’t care how average people live”.
The lockdown has not been without humour. Shanghai residents joke that the world has “lain flat”, or given up on controlling covid and let it run wild. They, too, would like to lie flat, but China’s central government has forced them instead to do sit-ups in its attempt to achieve zero-covid.
“Covid is not the thing we are afraid of; it’s government policy”
Tensions between Shanghai and other parts of China have existed for ages. The Shanghainese fancy themselves more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than folk from other cities. Many of them feel that Shanghai has been marauded by outsiders who cannot understand their language or culture. The lockdown appears to have breathed new life into localist sentiment.
In December an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian, told foreign reporters that they could “chuckle to themselves”, or touzhele, for being able to live comfortably in China during the pandemic. During the lockdown, a photo of a Shanghai resident with a picture of Zhao and the “chuckle” quote taped to his back has been shared widely on social media. The phrase, which along with Zhao’s name also became unsearchable on Chinese social media for a time, now serves as a riposte to the distorted vision of the country the Chinese government presents to the world.
Locals have been hard at work creating a counter-narrative. A Shanghai-based rapper called Astro posted a song titled “New Slave” on YouTube with frank lyrics about what’s happening in the city. He notes that “those in uniform care only about their careers and don’t give a shit about life or dignity”. On the evening of April 22nd a video cataloguing many of the government’s lies and missteps over the past few weeks was shared so widely across Chinese social media that for a short period of time censors appeared unable to keep up.
The government is cracking down on dissenters. Police visit people who post unfavourable commentary on Twitter. Signs in covid camps warn patients that posting images of their surroundings on social media could violate the law. But through the perpetual haze of China’s case of long covid, a crisper image of the Shanghai lockdown is starting to emerge.■
Don Weinland is China business and finance editor at The Economist
