China Lockdowns
PA N DE M IC R E S P ON S E
TRAPPED IN A ‘DEAD’ CITY By Eva Fu
H
40 I N S I G H T November 19 – 25, 2021
CHINE S E CITIZENS recall the financial and mental toll from living under Beijing's harsh ‘zero-COVID’ policies.
arguably some of the harshest pandemic policies yet seen. Ruili has locked down its population of 280,000 people four times in the past year. With a total time under lockdown at more than 200 days and counting, the city has been brought to near paralysis. Much of normal daily life has been paused as the city’s officials struggle to stamp out every infection, a policy that Beijing has insisted upon, even as much of the world has moved on to less restrictive containment measures. During Halloween, around 34,000 visitors found themselves locked in Shanghai Disneyland until midnight to be checked for COVID-19, because of one positive case. Wuhan, Beijing, and Shanghai have called off marathons as the country battles the contagious Delta variant. Zhuanghe, a county in northeastern China, set all traffic lights to red on Nov. 4 to bar traffic over one reported infection, and a sudden lockdown in Inner Mongolia stranded nearly 10,000 tourists in a city with only 35,000 residents following the detection of local infections. In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, police in early November sent a text message to 82,000 residents warning them not to leave their homes. These people were designated as “companions in space and time,” a new term coined by authorities describing those who have stayed for more than 10 minutes in the same area as a
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: SHUTTERSTOCK, STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK
e may be short in years, but not so with his COVID-19 testing record. At not quite 2 years of age, the boy was born at a time of great upheaval—in January 2020 at the start of the pandemic, just days after Beijing instituted lockdown policies following a weeks-long delay in admitting the severity of the outbreak. Ever since around 3 months old, the toddler has been subjected to repeated virus testing. As of October, he has been through 74—once every three days in recent months—even when he spends most of his time at home and has little contact with the outside world. The procedure has been frequent enough that he no longer cries at the sight of a medical worker, but readily opens his mouth, although the throat swab apparently makes him nauseated. The toddler became a media sensation in the country after his father, a jade merchant from the southern border city of Ruili, China, posted a short clip of the child on the internet. Netizens adored him and joked about his meme-worthy look of resignation, with some commenting sympathetically that he probably sees more of the medical staff than he sees of his own friends. Lighthearted as it may sound, the reality in his hometown is anything but. Located in the southwestern corner of China, the remote town of Ruili, a gateway to Burma (Myanmar) famed for its jade and emeralds, has
