Un unprecedented lockdown, very rigid, so rigid it looks like a nightmare or a horror movie. This is what the Shanghai area, the Chinese financial capital, has been experiencing since 5 April. with 26 million inhabitants (two and a half times Wuhan, which has only 11 million). An extreme measure implemented to face the peak of infections due to the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2: just over 25 thousand cases (on Sunday 10 April) are too many just considering that China continues to adopt a defined policy “Zero-Covid”. Total victory over the virus and not, as elsewhere in the world, including Europe, coexistence with the virus.
Nightmare atmosphere in Shanghai
It is forbidden to leave the house unless authorized: people are literally sealed off. The positives, including asymptomatic ones, and they are the majority, come transferred to isolation camps where they are crammed into a few square meters. Several minors, including babies, were brutally separated from their parents and that the authorities then dismissed it as a protocol error does not absolve the system and does not cancel the trauma.
A guard, in an anti-Covid suit, locks a man inside his shop, in quarantine. EPA / ALEX PLAVEVSKI
But even for those who are not infected, life is a challenge: the food distribution chain has jammed, the local government has also admitted, but it is not clear why. For a system that can periodically test the entire population of Shanghai thanks to 20,000 tampon hubs spread across the city, food supply seems like an impossible challenge.
Hungry, desperate, 26 million Chinese are exhausted
Many citizens failed to stockpile before the announcement of the blockade, food is nowhere to be found and it is also very difficult to book home deliveries so people are forced to ration the little they have. The tap water is not drinkable and has begun to boil to consume it: so much so that images circulate in chats on how to boil it correctly. We end up bartering food between neighbors but with enormous practical difficulties because, in fact, we cannot even cross the door of the house. In fact, the sanitary ware sealed the doors from the outside, and barbed wire was also seen to close entire blocks.
As Alice Su, correspondent for The Economist on her Twitter account, told drones and robot dogs invite Shanghai residents to “Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing “ (“Keep the desire for freedom in check. And not to open windows or sing”)
Scenes from the apocalypse
The images collected by a drone flying across the skies of Shanghai at night while people screaming at the windows that they are hungry is, indeed, worthy of a horror movie. Like those of the dog, left on the street by its owner without food, and beaten to death by an anti-covid health worker in the street. Images that circulate, despite censorship, circulate: thanks also to the foreigners who populate the city and who use social media by circumventing the prohibitions.
Foreigners who, however, will not stay long, in these conditions. Washington has already decided to evacuate all non-essential personnel from Shanghai for what it calls “arbitrary detentions” (a move that Beijing immediately condemned, calling it “a politicization and exploitation of the question”), the EU Chamber of Commerce has asked Beijing to review its policy and many international companies plan to leave China permanently.
Punish Shanghai?
But the horror is not mitigated, indeed perhaps it is greater, due to the fact that the severity of the symptoms of the Omicron variant, although contagious, does not seem to justify the measures taken to deal with it. This lockdown seems to have political rather than medical reasons. The elections are near, Xi Jinping aspires to a third term and it seems that he has, in other words, chosen to punish the progressive Shanghai, too distant, for her tastes, from the rigor of Beijing.
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