\n\n“Shanghai, China\u2019s bustling cosmopolis of 26 million has been under lockdown since late March under the nation\u2019s strict \u201cdynamic zero-Covid\u201d protocols, a system so poorly managed that residents are frequently unable to access basic necessities like food, medications, and medical care, prompting fairly widespread, spontaneous protests both online and in real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government has touted the zero-Covid strategy, the government\u2019s system of containment using intensive testing and tracing, combined with partial or complete lockdowns when a case is detected, has kept case counts and deaths low over the past two years. But the reports coming out of Shanghai suggest that the local government was unprepared for an outbreak in the country\u2019s economic center and cast doubt on the feasibility of zero Covid at this point in the pandemic. That\u2019s translated into serious struggles for residents, including hours-long ambulance wait times, dwindling savings, and inadequate or rotten food supplies, among others. Although the central government is reportedly stepping up efforts to get supplies to the city, the overall policy is driving many residents to criticize the government\u2019s policy \u2014 and Shanghai\u2019s implementation of it \u2014 despite serious potential risks to their safety and freedom by doing so.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The Shanghai outbreak is thus far China\u2019s most serious since the beginning of the pandemic; a staggering 200,000 cases have been reported since the outbreak started in March, though that\u2019s likely under-reported, according to the New York Times<\/a>. What started as a patchwork of temporary lockdowns to limit the spread of disease quickly turned into an interminable, city-wide shutdown with people only allowed out to take PCR tests, as a New York magazine<\/a> piece explained earlier this week. Shanghai\u2019s lockdown, two years into the pandemic, is rivaled only by those in Wuhan in 2020 and Xi\u2019an at the end of last year in terms of strictness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shanghai residents\u2019outrage \u2014 which they\u2019ve expressed by singing and chanting from their balconies and co-opting anti-American hashtags used by government officials to criticize the US \u2014 is borne from the fact that the government isn\u2019t providing the stability it promises in exchange for personal freedoms, according to Rui Zhong, program associate at the Wilson Center\u2019s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. \u201cI think what makes people angry in Shanghai, and what made people angry in Xi\u2019an is, Covid has been a problem for years,\u201d she told Vox. \u201cI think they\u2019ve been really stunned at the degree to which their local officials haven\u2019t necessarily prepared, including non-supply-chain issues,\u201d like hospital admissions.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Shanghai\u2019s local government enjoys a degree of relative autonomyin the context of President Xi Jinping\u2019s China; it\u2019s technically directly under the control of the central government<\/a>, as a province-level city, but enjoys special status as the country\u2019s financial hub and a showpiece for the rest of the world. Until March, the local government had handled the pandemic well, with no major outbreaks. But the rapid onset of the omicron variant and the corresponding draconian government measures are pushing some citizens to the brink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have no more money \u2026 What am I to do? I don\u2019t care anymore,\u201d one man shouts to his whole building in a viral video on Weibo, China\u2019s answer to Twitter. \u201cJust let the Communist Party take me.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n