The Shanghai Lockdown Looks More Like a Crackdown

Shanghai has always seen itself as special. It sets itself apart through its sense of being China's most cosmopolitan, forward-looking, and international city (a self-assessment not always shared by others). Its dialect is almost intentionally unintelligible to other Chinese-speaking people. Most of all, Shanghai sets itself not only apart but also above any upstart domestic rival by claiming a top spot as the financial hub of China.

Colloquially, Shanghai revels in its status as the city that everyone else in China loves to hate. It gleefully reciprocates, openly acknowledging that it looks down on the rest of China as backward and unsophisticated. Anecdotal instances of Shanghainese referring to their provincial brethren as 乡下 老 (xiang xia lao, a derogatory term generally meaning “country bumpkin”) are common.

But in April, Shanghai received another, much less welcome status: The site of China’s largest COVID-19 lockdown.

Starting on April 1, Shanghai residents were locked in their homes, while supplies of food and medicine dwindled. To vent their frustration, apartment dwellers took to banging pots from their balconies, and in videos posted to social media thousands could be heard chanting pleas for help out into the empty, non-responsive night.

Two weeks into the citywide shutdown, which encompasses more than 25 million residents, resistance and anger in Shanghai was reaching a boiling point. Local officials found themselves in an awkward position, forced to carefully calibrate COVID-19 restrictions in order to pacify an increasingly angry population while at the same time ensuring that they don't fall afoul of the central government's mandates to control the spread of the virus.

To add insult to injury, thousands of the workers who are enforcing the lockdown, manning the testing centers, and supervising the quarantine centers have been brought in from those very provinces of which many native Shanghainese have a dim view.

Many Shanghai residents are economically middle-class and above. People living in apartments that they own are often U.S. dollar millionaires just in the value of their property. Now this well-heeled class – the same group that typifies the modern, worldly image China wants to hold up to the world – is being advised by drones to stop complaining about being shut inside their apartments 24/7 and to control their “soul's desire for freedom.”

By April 20, restrictions were slowly being lifted, with some Shanghai residents allowed outside and stores starting to reopen in some areas. But roughly half the population was still restricted to their apartments, and Shanghai still hadn’t fully resolved supply issues that has many residents scrambling to line up deliveries of food and medicine.

One American commentator suggested that the lockdowns are a way for the Communist government to exert even greater power over the people of China. In this case, though, to what end? The Chinese Communist Party already knows very well that they have a great deal of power over people's lives. That is not in question and the CCP does not need to take draconian measures to prove it either to themselves or to Chinese citizens.

The problem is that the central government has made a promise upon which it cannot deliver. That pledge – zero tolerance for COVID-19 – is proving to be impossible, all over the world. One need look no further than cruise ships whose passengers and crew members embark fully vaccinated and with negative test results, only for cases of COVID-19 to appear apparently out of nowhere. The rise of the Omicron variant brought COVID-19 even to the remote Pacific Island states that had successfully shut out the virus for nearly two years.

The very last thing that the Chinese leadership wants to do is shut down the economic engine of China. The leadership also has no appetite for turning people who have originally been supporters of its approach to COVID-19 into angry protesters who won't be silent or mollified under any circumstances.

Nonetheless, the measures that were supposed to control the spread of COVID-19 in Shanghai are now looking more like a crackdown than a lockdown.

Some of those measures also highlight cultural differences within China itself.

The summary execution of pets belonging to those who are sent off to the COVID quarantine centers is less surprising than it ought to be. China’s pet culture is primarily the province of a well-to-do, well-educated elite. As the South China Morning Post put it, “The country’s new crop of pet owners have several things in common: they are young, well-educated and earning a high income.”

It's a status symbol to own a dog and walk it down the street. Owning and caring for a pet is largely not a working person’s luxury. More importantly, it is not a working person’s concept. Sadly, the care and concern for an animal is not yet built into the mindset of many in China. So, brutal as it is, the killing of pets – as has been documented on video – is not as uncommon or unusual as one would hope it should be. But it is in direct contrast to the culture of treating animals with love and respect that is now found among many of Shanghai's elite.

The state of the quarantine centers themselves highlight yet another cultural gap. From what video has shown, the centers are highly typical of ordinary Chinese hospital wards in which only the bare necessities are provided by the hospital. Indeed, most Chinese hospitals do not provide a cup for drinking water, much less potable water itself. Soap, toilet paper, towels, and other amenities that would be considered standard elsewhere must be provided by the patient and his or her family and friends. Indeed, the state of the quarantine centers appears to be in line with the standards of public hospital health care in China throughout the nation.

Well-to-do city dwellers, however, can often pay for better. They will not have experienced conditions like those in the quarantine centers for many years, if ever, a fact which is only exacerbating the ire of Shanghai residents.

China has seen how unprepared health systems in other countries have been completely overwhelmed. For China, the calculation is which is least likely to provoke mass-scale protest: severe lockdowns of the living or morgues full of the dead? Which is worse, an angry population, or a grieving and bereaved one?

The problem is that the government and the Chinese Communist Party are now all in, making it difficult to change course even as anger grows and the new variant appears less lethal. If they now back down to restrictions that accommodate some level of COVID-19 rather than insisting on a zero-tolerance approach, the party will lose face and with it, authority. Their dilemma is how to retreat while making it look like a forward advance.