Since the beginning of June, when the authorities in Shanghai lifted a months-long lockdown, many aspects of life in the city have returned to normal. The once-deserted freeways around China’s financial hub are again full of traffic. The white-collar workers who moved into their offices during April and May have at last returned home. The number of cases of covid-19 found outside quarantine has dropped to single digits. Just one was detected on June 13th.
But Shanghai’s officials are still on edge. Many residential communities reopened only to be locked down again when a positive case, or merely a close contact of one, was found in their vicinity. Residents continue to be taken away to quarantine centres if they live in the same building as someone infected. A case linked to a hair salon on a heavily travelled thoroughfare resulted in hundreds of people being whisked into isolation and several housing compounds being locked down. The city ordered most of its 25m residents into mass testing on June 11th and 12th.
This is what the new version of China’s “dynamic zero-covid” campaign looks like. Rolling “micro-lockdowns” and mass testing are meant to replace economically destructive citywide lockdowns. The strategy is supposed to be more targeted, finding and quarantining individual positive cases and their close contacts within hours. But calibration is proving difficult.
In Beijing, another testbed of the campaign, hundreds of cases were recently traced to Heaven Supermarket, a bar in the city centre. Local officials had only recently declared the latest outbreak over and allowed such establishments to reopen. Now they have cancelled plans to reopen many schools, calling the situation “complex and severe”. Thousands of residents were put into quarantine and neighbourhoods sealed off. Sun Chunlan, a deputy prime minister who is in charge of the fight against covid, even went to inspect Heaven Supermarket herself (most likely the bar’s first visit from a member of the Politburo).
Despite calls by some experts to rethink the zero-covid strategy, the government is doubling down. Hundreds of thousands of testing facilities are being built across the country, as cities are required to be able to screen all residents within 24 hours. In Beijing and Shanghai residents must take a test every two or three days in order to enter shops, gyms or office buildings. There are often long queues to get swabbed. People joke that the common Chinese greeting of “Have you eaten yet?” is giving way to a new one: “Have you got tested yet?”
Humour, though, is in short supply. In Beijing and Shanghai the movement of residents is tracked through mobile-phone apps. Many live in fear of being ensnared by the government’s covid controls, which are enforced by local officials who fear the sack if a new outbreak occurs. Sometimes the rules are not clear. In Shanghai the police have been breaking up crowds outside bars without explanation. In Beijing metal barriers have suddenly appeared to stop young people from gathering on the banks of the city’s canals. “Don’t go anywhere, it’s safest to lie down and rot at home,” says an online commenter.
Local businesses such as restaurants have received little guidance from officials. Many are preparing for disruptions that could last months. They were already suffering. Tensions boiled over in Shanghai on June 13th, when hundreds of people protested. Most ran stalls at the city’s biggest wholesale market for clothes. After months of lost business, they chanted: “Return our rents.” The government has done little to help. In Beijing the authorities have named and shamed shops for not enforcing temperature checks or mask-wearing.
Some hope that the government will ease restrictions after an all-important Communist Party congress later this year. For that to happen without a wave of deaths, the vaccination rate among the elderly must rise. To win over hold-outs a number of cities are offering to insure people 60 and over against jab-related side effects.
But in other ways, the government has signalled its intent to stay the course. China has already pulled out of hosting next year’s Asian Cup football competition. “Victory comes from perseverance,” says President Xi Jinping of his covid policy. Frequent testing, invasive tracking and targeted lockdowns: this is the new normal. Few expect it to end soon.
