Shanghai spent two years avoiding a coronavirus lockdown, but when it finally arrived, the authorities in charge of this city of nearly 30 million people were unprepared. The city has responded with protest attacks, a sea of residents screaming from their home balconies in front of flashing apartment lights, and people looting supermarkets for food.
The shortage is affecting both the upper and lower strata of Shanghai society. And it’s leaving us with really dystopian images.
dystopian quarantine. China’s largest city has been under a draconian lockdown since April 5, when Beijing ordered a complete lockdown as part of its Zero Covid policy. The city’s 25 million residents have had to take six Covid tests since April 3 and are prohibited from leaving their homes, even to eat. The government has been removing rations and people are using delivery services which have themselves been reduced.
The videos of desperate people screaming from their apartments in skyscrapers they already seemed dystopian. But they are even more creepy clips of a drone flying overhead and emitting a robotic voice telling residents: “Please abide by the restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
residents in #Shanghai screaming from high rise apartments after 7 straight days of the city lockdown. The narrator worries that there will be major problems. (in Shanghainese dialect—he predicts people can’t hold out much longer—he implies tragedy).pic.twitter.com/jsQt6IdQNh
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) April 10, 2022
Food shortage. Those who test positive, including children, are forcibly taken to quarantine hospitals, but those who test negative are still not allowed to leave their homes. Videos on social media show people fighting with security personnel and shouting that they have no food.
Chinese tycoon Kathy Xu has tried to join a collective that buys bread and milk, Marines based at the US consulate have had to order food to be shipped, and some workers have reported eating a steamed bun every other day. . In their precincts, residents have had to coordinate with hundreds of neighbors to place orders large enough to bring in full truckloads.
broken supply chain. The problem that has brought citizens to the streets and clashes with medical personnel and the police is supply. This cosmopolitan hub suddenly shut down its economy, but officials now admit they hadn’t thought about how they would ship food to the complexes once delivery drivers or grocery workers were isolated or in lockdown.
Mao Fang, vice president of one of China’s largest supermarkets, Meituan, said the vegetables had arrived at the company’s warehouses, but there was no one to sort them. They brought in another 1,000 workers from other cities to clear the backlog, but the companies are still struggling to keep up.
23) But elsewhere in the city, there are scenes of looting / mob attacking food shipments too. There are many other small protest videos too—but you get the idea. It’s not everywhere, but it is happening often I’m told. pic.twitter.com/W50JtuU4R8
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) April 10, 2022
far from over. Rebecca Kanthor, a journalist in Shanghai, explained in this NPR report that some people only received the notice a few hours before the lockdown began and did not have time to buy food: “People are very frustrated. Not everyone goes out and yelling and publicly getting upset like that, but people are definitely on social media… expressing their frustration because Shanghai is a really big city, it has a reputation of being a very progressive city and up until this point, no one thought that It would close like this.”
On Sunday, 24,944 new infections were registered, of which only 1,006 were symptomatic. “The tsunami has not reached its peak yet, and concerns are that the city lockdown will last a few more weeks, which may cripple the local economy,” said Wang Feng, president of the Shanghai-based financial services group. .