Yunnan is a province that resists efficient administration even today. In general, rules in Yunnan are not consistently enforced. Is that because the officials are lazy or incompetent? Who cares, probably both. I saw how villagers circumvented regulations that threatened their way of life. The most important event to happen over the past decade was a visit from Xi Jinping in 2015, when the top leader admonished local officials to clean up the lake. Officials then jumped to implement the order. Among their measures was to direct all water from the mountains to flow into the lake. Villagers who were used to spring water from the mountains for their drinking and food production now had to drink treated water.
Locals spoke of that water diversion as one of the most upsetting things in village history. It was not that they objected to cleaning up the lake. It was that a word from the top leader prompted local officials to deny them the best water in China, while making an at-best-minimal contribution to the cleanup. Their response was to climb further up the mountains and lay new pipes to send water to the village temple. They taught me to bring my own jugs to fill up there.
Local officials came to the village temple not with hammers to smash these pipes, but with their own jugs for filling up. Here, it is still possible to navigate around senseless directives from the central government. Dali’s culture of open drug use may have dissipated, but the region retains an ineffectualness. Distance from the party center is one reason that Yunnan has drawn a growing number of emigrés tired of the city life. That emigration accelerated this year, as the oppressiveness in big cities grew intense.
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Shanghai’s lockdown would last more than four days: it ended after eight weeks. 25 million people were unable to leave their home or residential compounds between April and May. (Some even longer, as their compounds started locking down in March.) The main exception was the ability to go out for rounds of PCR tests conducted daily or every few days.
The March 27th announcement came after city officials repeatedly denied that they would impose a full lockdown. That robbed a sense of urgency among most of my friends to stockpile essential supplies. I didn’t stockpile either, but I did decide to leave. Within an hour of the announcement, I had booked a plane ticket to Yunnan. Most people in Shanghai would suffer a bleak April.
Food became the overwhelming concern. Fresh vegetables and fruits ran out after a week or so. The government promised to deliver food, but that proved a logistical impossibility for a city of 25 million people: truck drivers couldn’t deliver their freight into the city, and the produce either was not enough to go around or spoiled by ultimate delivery. Nearly all my friends told me that there were a few days in mid-April when they dealt with serious food insecurity. Some with children fasted to save food for the kids. Many friends spent most of their waking hours trying to procure food, often getting up at the crack of dawn to place orders. The situation took about three weeks to improve, as people managed to set up inefficient group-buying networks, or the government-run food logistics system worked out its issues.
There were other problems. Anyone with a health condition was gripped by fear that their medications would run out. Everyone hoped that they wouldn’t need to access hospital treatment. One friend broke an ankle shortly before the lockdown, spending two months bedbound as she awaited surgery. Another developed a hernia. A third friend’s uncle died because he had diabetes and could not go for dialysis treatments.
The situation worsened if one tested positive. A trip to a centralized quarantine facility (often a bed in a convention center) would await. That was sometimes the least concern. The city’s policy was to separate children from their parents if either tested positive; fear of separation drove parents mad with worry, until an outcry prompted the city to drop the policy. Dog-owners who couldn’t find another household willing to host their pet had to decide whether to leave it alone at home for the duration of their illness; or let it loose outside and hope for the best. (A viral video of a health worker beating a corgi to death with a shovel did not help to make the decision easier.) A positive test would summon cleaning staff into one’s home, who could soak everything—clothes, books, furniture—in disinfectant.
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For me, the most astonishing part of the abrupt abandonment of zero-Covid has to do with fever medications (like ibuprofen and paracetamol). The government had over the last three years put up obstacles for people to purchase fever meds. Health authorities feared that people might self-medicate at home rather than submit to the quarantines. So pharmacies would be ordered to remove fever meds from their shelves during an outbreak, or they would demand customers to furnish their national ID for contact tracing. That deterred purchases, and, I suspect, greater production by manufacturers. Therefore much of the Chinese population met their Covid wave without much fever meds on hand. As best as I can tell, China is the only country that followed a twisted logic to deny people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic.
As Covid descended, the government tried to assure everyone that the virus is not so deadly. But whom did the propaganda authorities wheel out to deliver that comforting message? The same experts who weeks ago were saying that it would be extraordinarily irresponsible to abandon controls. One person who stayed silent was top leader Xi Jinping. He has obliquely acknowledged the abandonment of zero-Covid, referencing hard times in generic terms. He did not explain the reversal of a policy he has personally insisted on, or give comfort to a people who would face a disease that propaganda authorities spent three years terrifying them about. Neither did anyone else in the central leadership.
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In the short term, I expect that most of the suffering under three years of zero-Covid will be forgotten. People are already exuberant in the streets of Shanghai, happy to enjoy life in one of Asia’s most splendid cities. And just as people in Europe and the US put the pandemic behind them, so I believe that Chinese will. This is unlikely, but there’s some chance that in a few years, we’ll look back on zero-Covid in the same way that we look back today on China’s 2015 stock market crash: a puzzling and painful event to live through—generating many headlines on the failures of the Chinese government—but in retrospect not really a defining crisis it seemed to be at the time.
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The Chinese state remains enormously capable. But that statement demands refinements. First, it increasingly resembles a crew of firefighters who bring extraordinary skill to dousing fires that they themselves ignited. Like in 2020, after local authorities in Wuhan censored reports of a new viral infection, requiring a mammoth national effort to contain the spread of the virus later. Or as it tried to stamp out a financial crisis in the property sector this year by triggering a different kind of crisis, as housing demand and construction collapsed. Second, China’s problem is usually not too little state capacity, but too much. Beijing shows that it’s utterly possible to fail when it succeeds, for example by bringing too much state capacity to bear on solutions like zero-Covid or a one-child policy.
From the letter:
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