China in 2023: The Post-Pandemic Redemption of a Great Power, Part I
Read Time:9 Minute, 43 Second
Chad Higgenbottom
Edited by Max Hahn
While China opened its borders in January of this year, months later, it is still difficult to fathom the sudden, rapid fall of the zero-Covid regime, particularly for those who lived through all three turbulent years of it. The author of this piece, being among that group of “zero-Covid long-haulers,” will first sketch a personal history of the past three years; in Part II, the author will share sights, experiences, and analysis of the new era rapidly unfolding in China in 2023.
Not a single face was visible when I disembarked at PVG in Pudong; among airport staff, not even a sliver of skin was exposed. All staff and plenty of travelers wore those suffocating N95s rather than a far more tolerable surgical mask, including myself, as I trawled cautiously through the vastness of terminal two. Poor souls dressed three-quarters as astronauts and one-quarter as custodians paced to my left and right, spraying every area of the premise with clouds of chemicals generated by back-borne machines. The scene felt more like a background frame to a World War Z sequel than a return to my city of residence and work.
I presume my experiences were relatable to all travelers or residents who found themselves in a large Chinese airport in March 2020. Following enough security checkpoints to make Area 51 jealous, we finally made it into busses that transported anyone just arriving into the country into one of many quarantine sites, with mine pulling eventually into a nondescript lot far from any urban core but in service of a sizable hotel. I stood outside the bus a long while awaiting my second 核酸 (hesuan) of the day, even calling into my brother-in-law’s dissertation defense on Zoom and making decent enough small talk with the girl ahead of me that the site supervisor assumed we were quarantining together. I was quite alone the ensuing three weeks, of course, but with clean, spacious accommodation and necessities amply available, my 2020 quarantine experience in Shanghai was fully satisfactory. It might have helped that I tested negative every step of the way.
I was discharged from the obscure hotel after only a few nights’ stay, all for free, and transported to an apartment superior to my own, with food and other essentials deliverable as needed and (crucially) a rooftop accessible for air and exercise with a panoramic view of the city whenever I wished. Once my roommate dropped my digital piano off at my door so I could be merrily preoccupied when not working, I was a happy camper the remainder of home quarantine, not nearly as jolted upon being told I could re-enter the world as one might have expected. Once I did, a fresh spring wind greeted me alongside a far milder set of covid controls than those observing China from afar might have presumed, while my workday as a bilingual school history teacher was generously abridged until we returned to campus late in the semester. A few weeks in total of quarantine passed quickly, and I resumed roaming about the city again by mid-April and even held a memorable birthday festivity at the end of that month.
It is also true that, until this year, I had been one of the last to reacclimate so affably to their life in China. The border was closed days after my re-entry and those who somehow did manage to return thereafter tended to cover the costs of their quarantine accommodation. By 2021, it had become far less complicated for Chinese nationals to return home, but the international community still left in Shanghai would remain for three years, mostly as it was the day the border closed, given that very few were able to return from that day onward until early 2023.
For those who stuck around, however, life in Shanghai between late spring 2020 and March of 2022 was great compared to much of the rest of the world. Covid cases were rare, and covid controls were generally lax. In terms of individual liberties, the second half of 2020 was, in fact, the best of times in Covid-era Shanghai. Large-scale gatherings and events still took place, and we hadn’t needed to thrust out those health QR codes every time we approached someone’s porch. Domestic travel restrictions to most regions were negligible, and lockdowns generally nonexistent, save for the perennially embattled province of Xinjiang. While the rest of the world sank deeper into pandemic pandemonium, the zero-Covid regime towered over its critics.
Or, so it seemed.
Enthusiasm for the predictability and relative normalcy of zero-Covid life dwindled drastically as the summer travel season of 2021 came and went without opportunities for travel abroad. Weddings, funerals, and standard economic activity began to resume across the rest of the world without the need for our permission or presence. China, rather, moved in the opposite direction, as the Delta variant bore cracks into the seams of its pandemic prevention regime. They widened into fault lines after winter.
One morning in late March of 2022, I had descended to the bottom floor of my building for a normal 包子 (baozi) run when a wave of shock overcame me: there was no exit. The quarantine tape had already been strewn. The citywide lockdown I’d dreaded rumors of was real and had come early.
My neighbors and I trudged dejectedly back upstairs to our home captivity, doing little over the ensuing days but commiserating on WeChat with friends throughout the city, attempting with increasing futility to acquire decent food and glaring out the window at residents of other buildings as they glared back. Once it became evident that officials’ claims of an end to the lockdown on April 5th were wholly contrived, the city’s descent into chaos deepened. Some neighborhoods began rapidly running out of food. Whether suffering from pneumonia or, more often than not, from mild symptoms or even none at all, most designated as “positive cases” were escorted by gangs of henchmen in hazmats from their homes, sometimes forcefully, and taken by vehicles to makeshift centralized quarantine centers called fangcang, as the state attempted to stow away positive cases from prying eyes. But eyes cannot be pried away in a nation of well over 1 billion active smartphones, and videos of violent clashes between citizens and the state, derelict quarantine conditions, and even suicides began to circulate without censorship on WeChat, one of the world’s most censored platforms.
There was some reprieve in the summertime with the official “end of the lockdown,” but by June, much damage was irreversible. I called up a friend to meet me and then bounded exuberantly towards a well-known Cantonese eatery near the Bund we were both fond of, only to realize on arrival it had been one of the many small businesses to shutter its doors permanently after months without income. Some multinationals long-established in China are still now mulling over strategies and value chains less dependent on firms – and politics – in China to function.
By November of 2022, the CPC’s “whack-a-mole” pandemic response had come to a climax: in place of the largest single-city quarantine in human history, Shanghai had reverted to a patchwork of capricious, smaller-scale lockdowns of any city quarters and buildings deemed as bearing an infinitesimal risk to public health. So much as a hypothetical exchange of respiratory droplets between an individual who might have had covid and one who might have passed them in some coffee shop – as discerned by big data collections tracking smartphone users’ whereabouts – was often enough to seal up even the latter individual, along with hundreds of neighbors, in their apartment building for up to seven days.
If that sounds preposterous, some places were sealed off for even less than this: a hotel I checked into for a brief staycation amidst Thanksgiving week was suddenly besieged by an army in hazmat suits, also known as dabai, who quickly began sealing the front doors and all possible escape routes in the back of the building and lot. I, as a grad student, was resolved not to lose more of my scarce income to this forced indefinite residence in a starred hotel, so I scaled a gate in the courtyard the dabai were not patrolling, leaped to freedom on the other side, and hustled to the metro before someone could ask questions. As someone with endemic tech failures and malfunctions, it is utterly incredible my laptop screen was unscathed when I later inspected the contents of the backpack I had heaved onto the pavement below before my leap.
Yet, by the next day, this hotel had not even been listed on a daily report published by the government showing every possible address in the city where confirmed cases or their contacts had been located. I called the hotel that day for an explanation but to no avail. My best inference is that this large hotel, located in one of Shanghai’s most historic and well-off areas, had been quarantined on account of a guest’s possible interaction with someone who had possibly crossed paths with someone else carrying a very mild form of covid. Indeed, if those governing this pandemic response had not been daring each other to effect increasingly preposterous measures, then I struggle to explain how they found all of this rational.
Given the madness of this pandemic response, alongside the sudden, furious streetside protests late in November it provoked and subsequently crushed, the sense that Shanghai’s 21st-century heyday had been thoroughly vanquished was real. The rest of the world had hoped throughout 2021 for a belated end to 2020, and before long, their hopes were granted. Over in Shanghai, as 2023 approached, I wondered if 2022 would conclude before 2025.
Sports fans of good temperament whose predictions of a rival’s failure fall short will admit after the game that they must “eat crow;” well, I am now dining on my own plate of crow, sauteed, and sauced. While it is rarely the case in other authoritarian countries, in China, it may be the case that its unlimited form of government can resolve even more crises than it creates.
Stay tuned for Part II, which will present newer stories to substantiate the author’s renewed optimism toward China as of June 2023.
