The lockdown in China’s economic and financial center is being extended – indefinitely. The authorities are still unable to get the food supply to the population under control.
Patients who have recovered from their Covid illness are leaving one of the city’s makeshift hospitals.
It has been almost exactly two weeks since the city of Shanghai, at the urging of Beijing, ordered a tough lockdown for the metropolis of 25 million people. And so far, the care of the citizens who are detained in their apartments has not yet settled down.
Black markets for vegetables and meat have already sprung up in some neighborhoods, and in some housing complexes residents arrange to meet after dark to barter: a bag of rice for a bag of eggplants, twenty eggs for some fruit. Even wealth does not protect against deprivation these days. In a gated community in the French Concession, a millionaire couple had to make do with a handful of carrots for two days. The first videos of protests by angry citizens are making the rounds on the Internet. The recordings cannot be independently verified, but one thing is certain: people’s dissatisfaction and frustration with the authorities’ failure are beginning to break out openly.
“Does the government want to starve us here,” scolds a woman who has been stuck in her apartment in the Jing’an district on the west side of Shanghai for ten days, “I just don’t understand the organization anymore.” She chooses drastic words for her verdict on the authorities’ corona management: “Super nonsense and full of bullshit.”
Beijing is in charge in Shanghai
At the start of the restrictions a good two weeks ago, the authorities initially said that the Pudong district in the east would go into lockdown for four days. Then the people in Puxi in the west would be sent into isolation. After several rounds of testing, the authorities wanted to lift the lockdown again. In the meantime, China’s central government has taken responsibility for crisis management from the traditionally more liberal city administration in Shanghai – Beijing is now in charge.
The lockdown across the city has been extended indefinitely. Anyone who had the slightest doubt as to how serious China’s rulers are about the brutal implementation of the zero-Covid strategy in Shanghai was once again shocked by China’s state media remembered: the inventor of the strategy was head of state and party leader Xi Jinping, according to articles published last week. With that, all has been said. To monitor compliance, Xi summarily sent Sun Chunlan, deputy prime minister and member of the CCP’s Politburo, to Shanghai, where she met local authorities containment instructions of the pandemic.
The numbers continue to rise
While the city of Shanghai is trying to get the situation under control with more and more rounds of testing, more makeshift hospitals and quarantine centers and the transfer of infected people to the neighboring provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the number of confirmed infections continues to rise. On Sunday, the authorities in Shanghai reported an increase in infections from 1,006 to almost 25,000 compared to the previous day.
Shanghai is apparently overwhelmed with managing the outbreak. There are reports that buses full of infected people are driving around the greater Shanghai area for 24 hours and more because they don’t know which quarantine center to take people to. An owner of several hotels that have been converted into quarantine centers reports unsustainable conditions. 100 formerly infected people are still stuck in one of his hotels, although they have already tested negative several times. There is a lack of capacity to pick people up.
The most difficult thing, however, is supplying the Shanghai population with food. The large delivery services such as Meituan or Dingdong Maicai only handle large orders. “I’ve never had any success with the delivery services,” reports the woman in Shanghai’s Jing’an district. Now she’s curious to see whether the government will soon bring her food, “otherwise I’ll starve here.” The authorities are currently making sure that every household gets some vegetables or meat once a week. Much too little.
The logistics collapsed
The problem is less an acute shortage of food than the chaotic conditions in logistics in the greater Shanghai area. More and more drivers and warehouse workers are going into isolation; all truck traffic in Shanghai is severely hampered by permanent controls. As a result, food is already rotting in some warehouses. According to the government, around 11,000 courier drivers currently work in Shanghai. The number cannot be checked. According to the Chinese publication «Caixin Global» 54,000 courier drivers were on duty in Beijing in April 2020. Calculated by population, Beijing is only slightly smaller than Shanghai.
In order to somehow make ends meet in the difficult times, many people, abandoned by the government, try to somehow help themselves. Many set up shopping groups in the WeChat messenger service in order to be able to place large orders.
One of them is Huang Naiyi. From his condominium in Qingpu, western Shanghai, Huang hears military planes landing at nearby Hongqiao Airport. They bring helpers to the crisis city on the Yangtze River. Huang, who runs a dance school in Shanghai with fifteen employees, is a volunteer in the shopping group in his neighborhood. 860 people live there. Twenty group leaders collect the residents’ orders every day. Due to the large quantities, delivery works relatively well. The groceries usually come in the afternoon. Then the packages are disinfected and Huang drives his car through the neighborhood and helps with the distribution.
Always new outbreaks
Huang never believed that the lockdown in Shanghai would only last four days. “I immediately stocked up for three weeks,” he says on the phone. He had observed abroad how rapidly the omicron variant of the novel corona virus was spreading. Huang sees the cause of the current chaos in the initial hesitant attitude of the Shanghai government: “They absolutely wanted to avoid a hard lockdown.” At the same time, he doubts whether the zero-Covid policy is still applicable to the Omicron variant. Huang believes: “Even if the authorities get the outbreak under control here soon, there will always be new sources of infection.”
For the government, the current course in fighting the pandemic is highly risky. Shanghai is one of the wealthiest cities in China. Most of the people in the apartments are members of the middle class. If their dissatisfaction gets the upper hand, it could quickly become uncomfortable. The current radical course should therefore not be sustained for too long.