Odd Lots - This Is How a Locked-Down Shanghai Apartment Gets Food

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Shanghai, a city of nearly 30 million people, is currently under a hard lockdown, as the Chinese government sticks to its Covid Zero strategy of limiting the virus at all costs. There have been some shocking images and stories over the past few weeks of frustrated apartment dwellers unable to go outside or get basic necessities. Some of those things have improved somewhat, and now some residents are able to coordinate and make their own delivery food orders. On this episode, we speak with David Fishman, an energy analyst at the Lantau Group, who, himself, is in a locked down Shanghai apartment complex. He discusses how he's been able to coordinate with other residents to group-buy food and obtain basic essentials.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. Joe, it feels like everyone is a logistics expert nowadays. Yeah, everyone was a epidemiologist, and then everybody became a dredging expert, and now everyone is just a logistics expert overall. I mean, I am joking, but there are a lot of people in China specifically that have been forced into becoming actual logistics experts because of the lockdowns that have been going on now for, in, in some cases over a month in places like Shanghai. Yeah, this is a really good point. So when people joke about everyone becoming an expert,

usually they just mean they're an expert on Twitter or whatever. But for people who have to think about how do you get food or how do you distribute food and other key supplies during a mass lockdown, becoming a logistics expert actually is not just about tweeting. It's about serious stakes. Yeah. So just to set the stage, various parts of Shanghai happen in lockdown. again, in some cases for I think up to six weeks, something like that.

The citywide lockdown has been ongoing for about a month since the start of April. And what's been happening during that is, first of all, the government does deliver some groceries and needed supplies to people. But residents who are affected by the lockdown can also try to organize their own deliveries of essentials. And it's a phenomenon called group buying. It's something that's actually existed in China for a while now. It's not necessarily lockdown specific, but it has seen a, I don't want to say a renaissance, but it has become a very vital part of actually getting supplies. So today, I'm very excited.

We're going to be speaking with someone who has been personally involved in group buying for their residential complex, someone who has had to learn the intricacies of logistics and practice them on a day-to-day basis. This is going to be really interesting. There's been a lot of, I've seen various threads of people talking about what's available and going on the apps that they normally use to buy groceries. And every once in a while they are able to find something, but often not, sometimes are able to get a little bit of fresh food and people post images of what they're able to get in. But how this is all working, what the actual process is, how the big companies and the sort of delivery system is working. I still don't have a great understanding, so I'm looking forward to hearing what's going on in practice.

Yep, and it might become information that's more useful to even more people at the moment, because, of course, there is a lot of chatter that Beijing might go into lockdown soon as well. And we are recording this on April 26. So without further ado, let's bring on our guest. We're going to be speaking with David Fishman. He's a senior manager at the consulting firm Lantau Group over in Hong Kong, my former abode. and he's currently based in Shanghai. So, David, thanks so much for coming on all thoughts. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Maybe just to begin with, could you maybe set the scene for us? What exactly is group buying in China? Yeah, sure. So in its most pure basic economic sense, I guess, group buying is a bunch of people getting together and using the power of volume to secure a good deal, to secure a lower price or to incentivize a vendor or a supplier of something to maybe service an area that they wouldn't normally at a price that they wouldn't normally because now you have the power of a larger group of people all buying together. Well, can you, for our listeners to set the scene, describe roughly your living situation? Like how big of a building is it?

Like how many unit residences? And a little bit about like a sort of like day-to-day, you know, pre-lilis. lockdown what your current environment is like? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I live in apartment community in Shanghai, a pretty normal standard. I'd say middle class, maybe upper middle class apartment community. There's 25 floors in this building. Each floor has, I think, seven units.

And our apartment block has two buildings like that. It's on the smaller side, I would say definitely for an apartment community in China. So we've got 25 times seven times two is how many households we have in hours. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, some people are living in Shanghai's got a big variety of different types of architecture and different types of living conditions. Some people are living in these massive sprawling 30 buildings times 30 stories type places and other people are living in, you know, much older construction, much older buildings.

Maybe their whole community has just, you know, eight households. So when the city first went into lockdown or when you were first affected, what was the supply situation like? What was your initial reaction? Did you immediately go out, you know, as we all did in Hong Kong in the very early days of 2020 and start buying toilet paper and rice and things like that? Did you have time to stock up? The folks over in Pudong had about a day or two notice, and that meant we had about a day or two plus four days. So we had about six days notice. I've been through, I mean, I was in Shenzhen in 2020, and so we had a lockdown of sorts in Shenzhen, but that was different because we were able to leave the house and go out and buy groceries, you know, once every two days or something like that. The grocery stores were still functioning. There were still some deliveries going on. So it was a cessation of activities, but it wasn't a full, you know, stay inside your apartment

community, stay inside your apartment all the time. So this time around, we bought some stuff. We went out and, you know, picked up a few things just to make sure we had a normal amount of food. But not that much because, you know, it was only four days originally. And it didn't seem like, you know, we didn't think at the time. time that it was going to be at 10 or a 15 or a 20 day or, you know, we're at 26 days now. So we bought, I would say, a reasonable amount of food for, you know, four days of not being

able to get your favorite stuff. And that's about it. What do they tell you or when when they say, okay, you're going to lockdown? Like, what do they establish as the rules? How are they communicated and how are they enforced? So when it came to what does a lockdown mean, that was communicated really through kind of municipal level announcements. We understood already from other buildings and compounds that have had this quote unquote lockdown, that it would mean that the barrier between their compound and the street would probably be closed. And they'd say, hey, you know, you can't come by here. There's going to be some type of shelf there for delivery drivers and packages to be placed there. And then you can come and pick it up. And we've got this

kind of membrane between your big front gate and the outside world. So that's what we understood lockdown to be at the beginning. That was communicated through, through, you know, municipal level announcements and then kind of propagated down to individual community levels, the lowest organization level being, you know, the neighborhood committee or the local committee. So the local committee at that point used kind of people that they knew in the building already and volunteers and kind of the power of people adding people to pull everyone in our building into a we chat group, an instant messaging we chat group that we

could use to notify everybody, you know, at this time, on this day, we're going to be entering into our lockdown. So once the group, WeChat group was set up, how long was it until people were doing group buying for supplies? How did that get started? By the time I was pulled into the big group, we chat group, we had already established a group buying group, a separate group buying group, so we wouldn't clutter up the main group. So maybe, I guess it was probably immediate. And so we We said, yeah, the big group that should be used for just announcements about testing and lockdowns and things like that. Let's keep the group buying and all of that commercial activity in our group buying group. So it was pretty much immediate.

But what happens? Because I've seen conflicting reports about what is even possible. And people talk about going on the various grocery apps. And sometimes they say, oh, there's nothing available. There's nothing that can be delivered. I can't get through. Sometimes people talk about there is a little bit. it's one thing to be able to say you want to buy in a group, but what's available and what has the

process been like? Yeah, there was definitely an evolution to that. So remember, the first couple days, it was already planned, right? Everybody had bought four or five days of groceries, and even on the second day, there was a government parcel. So nobody was really freaking out at day two or day three or even day four. It was when the cases were still rising, say, day four, day five and our lockdown hadn't been lifted. And it had become increasingly hard to use the grocery delivery apps because, you know, the first couple days, people had stockpiles, they had food stored up. They weren't necessarily ordering food that day. So you could still get orders to the couple main grocery delivery apps that were available. But day four, day five, everybody was trying to

use them and it was just a huge bottleneck. At that same time, most of the group by vendors hadn't quite responded to the growing demand yet. So at that moment, you weren't getting anything through the standard grocery delivery apps and group buy offers were pretty limited. There's group buy platforms out there that are always offering stuff, but they couldn't get stuff into Shanghai. And the phenomenon of the Shanghai-only group-by offer

hadn't really emerged yet. So there was a couple days, you know, I would say like the sixth, the seventh for us, where there was a lot of real concern because it just didn't seem like any avenues, any channels, we're going to be able to bring us food. What is the Shanghai-only group buying offer? Because I've heard some talk of this. There are these different types of group buying requests that go out.

So you have sort of citywide group buying, and then you also have, I think, fantasy buying, where people put, like, long-shot items that they would really like to have, like burgers from ShakeShack and things like that. Yeah, I think I know what you're referencing. here. So definitely at the beginning when group buying was becoming prominent, but nobody was really sure what was out there, people would say, oh, I'd love to get, you know, X item. I'd love to get a delivery of Shake Shack. Does anybody know if Shake Shack is still open? Can we buy in bulk from Shake Shack? And they weren't at a time. This would be me, by the way, during the lockdown.

Yeah. Or a more practical one that keeps coming up is like, can somebody group buy some like hair salon, some guy to show up inside our, you know, a team of guys to show up inside our building and give everybody haircuts because we really need it now. That's a good fantasy. But no, at that time, the only things that were available for real, besides these fantasy ones, was you would go on, for example, we'll say like, Kwai Tuang Tuan, which is a brand underneath PDD, Pinduodua, big Chinese tech platform. And you would go on there and you'd see all these group buy offers. And they would say, you know, for noodles or rice or bread or wherever. But they couldn't actually get into Shanghai because the highway exits leading into Shanghai from outside of the city had checkpoints.

And it was a one-way trip. If you came into Shanghai, you couldn't leave again because it was a city under lockdown. So at that point, either you could find a vendor already in the Shanghai city limits or you could find a vendor, I guess, who was willing to make a one-way trip. Otherwise, there were no or very few options for Shanghai group buys. Eventually, these big commercial platforms, they started clearly noting, like Kui Tuan Tuan would have limited only to Shanghai, can deliver within 24 hours, 36 orders of noodles, you know, whatever. They would start noting very clearly that it was only available for Shanghai. Those were the big tech platforms. Besides that, you also had just hustlers, right? People who knew somebody who knew somebody who has a warehouse

out in the suburbs and the factory workers are close by and the warehouse workers are sleeping in the warehouse and tents, and they can get you in order of food. if you place an order through WeChat, something like that. That was, there's a couple different models. So how do you coordinate with the other households in your complex? And how does, what's the process of like, is someone deputized to actually place the order? Like, what is that process work like? Yeah, there's two different ways to do that.

The, the more functionally smooth one, certainly is to have the, the app, the software platform, Kuiuantuan, or another one. set up kind of like a shopping cart. They already have their shopping cart software set up. And so then you go in there. You choose the things that you want from the group by vendor. You click checkout. You make sure you write down your address, the building that you're in, and then you spam it. You send it out into the WeChat room. You say, hey, guys, I just placed an order on this platform. We only need 39 more people to place an order on this platform. Once we get 40 orders, they'll ship it all to our address. Please, just go buy. Go buy through this platform. That's the,

That's the smooth technologically enabled way. That's more preferable. The less smooth, less technologically enabled way is one person, me, for example, or another group leader, the group master, is the single point of contact. You contact the vendor, you pay the vendor a lump sum, and then you're responsible for individually collecting money from all the people in your building. I've done both ways. Just on the topic of payment, is non-payment ever an issue? Do people say, you know, I'm interested and then they don't pay, or is it technologically impossible for that to happen because everything is going through, you know, things like the red envelope app where you can make individual payments on WeChat and stuff like that? Well, for the technology-enabled ones that are going

through the platform, that's all, you know, all very smooth. If you pay, you get what you've received. And if the order doesn't meet its minimum requirement, you get refunded, no problem. When stuff goes through Me, yeah, we're operating a little bit on the honor system. For the first couple orders, I insisted on collecting all the payment first before I, you know, 90% plus of the payments before I felt comfortable making the bulk order. But after a couple times of it all working out okay, I felt more comfortable just kind of putting my neck out there and going out first and placing a big order for like a thousand bucks of apples or something. And then counting on the fact that my neighbors are going to pay me back. No, of course, they might not, but it's an enclosed invite. We're all neighbors. We all know each other now. You know where they live? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right down to the room number because I'm delivering the apples to it. So, yeah, it's on the honor system for that second one and we haven't had any real problems. What is the, you know, so obviously for any of this to work, there have to be individuals that aren't in lockdown and people who can make the deliveries and people who can operate the factories or the, you know, the grocery delivery centers. You know, obviously in the U.S., when there were cities, that had quasi lockdowns. I mean, we never had like real lockdowns here, but there were people who were designated at, you know, the so-called essential workers. How has the government there sort of established who can even be in a position to go around the city and make deliveries?

Yeah, sure. So at the beginning, it was almost no one. That's why we ran into the issues that we did at the very beginning where we had an extremely last mile delivery centric model, right? Just tens of thousands of last mile delivery drivers, all pretty much all removed from the street, or maybe just working on a skeleton crew of 5%, 3%, something like that. As the days went on, and it became apparent that this was going to last longer and that the last mile delivery guys had become a huge sticking point in the system, the major tech platforms, your Jingdong, your Ulema, your Maytoin, they recalled lots of workers who were previously in lockdown. with their families and said, please come back to work. We'll give you benefits and perks and overtime

pay and you can stay in a hotel and whatever perks they promised them. They called in drivers from other provinces as well to try to bolster their workforce. From the management side, I know these guys are required to get a test every day and maybe also a rapid antigen test once or twice throughout the day. And they have what's called a Tongising Zheng, like a travel permit specifically for, for logistics drivers and delivery drivers that you need to maintain a green code on so that you can keep driving around all day. In the last couple days, I know that they've just mixed up the system for that, and they're acquiring a different system for the delivery drivers. And a lot of the guys didn't get it updated in time. And so today we heard some stories of drivers being turned away

from compounds because they showed up the gate. They didn't have the new code set up yet. and the gate guard said, sorry, we've got orders. Go away. Go away. Come back with your new code. In general, what sort of adaptation have you seen from businesses? Because, you know, anecdotally, I have seen some talk of small-scale fruit sellers, you know, the type of people who used to have stands outside on sidewalks, maybe those converting into a pure sort of web-based selling model and things like that. Have you seen the major platforms and the small scale grocery shops, have those adapted to the new situation? Oh yeah, absolutely, with different channels and different products. So for a couple of examples, you know, my, my neighborhood coffee shop right across the

street, I used to go there and get a latte almost every day. Now they do bulk orders of fresh milk and coffee beans. And I assume they're acting as a front for one of their vendors, one of their suppliers, right? They, you know, hey, I'm now the last mile delivery point. Uh, let me know if you need a bulk order of 36 bags of coffee beans and I'll set that up for you from my vendor. So that's one example. At least he's still doing stuff related to his actual business. Others, you know, you'd go on on Maytuan delivery and you'd open up what used to be a crayfish restaurant or, uh, you know, uh, I know, some skewers or something like that. And you open up and they're selling eggs and packages of fruit and fresh, fresh pork or something, right? Like, they've got totally different

business models now, and they're just maintaining the fact that they still have a storefront, they still have a listing on the Maytuan delivery app, or they'll just have a product listing that says, doing offline business only, please add this phone number and we'll discuss on chat what we have for sale. They're doing everything they can to try to get the message out what they have for sale, even if it's totally unrelated to what their business used to be. Yeah, that definitely happened here during spring of 2020, and you'd see restaurants. It seemed like a mix. Like, you'd see restaurants essentially just selling groceries.

You also had commercial food wholesalers whose customers were typically restaurants suddenly offering retail. And so, like, you could buy, like, you know, hundreds of pounds of, like, duck fat or something, something that would typically go to a restaurant. I'm curious also, like, how a little bit more about how the informal. buying on when you have to use WeChat or you just have to like get a message out to someone like you usually say like the people sort of like hustling or scrounging things up from a warehouse. Like how do you like find those people and like build those connections and how how does the we chat based commerce work? Right.

So the we chat based stuff, it comes from a variety of channels. Sometimes it's a friend of a friend. Somebody says, hey, this guy is selling vegetables. Just add him and ask him what's going on. or maybe it's somebody in your neighborhood. It's generally a good practice as you become a frequent guest of various businesses in your neighborhood to get to know the people that own them, the local vegetable market seller or your local coffee guy or something like that. So if you had those in your WeChat already, obviously lean on that.

And then, you know, the channel I just mentioned where a lot of these stores, they maintain an online listing. they've taken all their products off of the shopping cart software except for one. And it's just a picture that says, to discuss what products we have, please add my WeChat. And then they give you their phone number. So that's, I would say those are the three main ways where you can try to find somebody who's hustling and has some stuff to sell. What items have been hardest for you to get hold of? At the beginning, it was all essentials. And so anything non-essential was really hard.

and that included everything from like dairy products besides milk to sweets to sodas, things like that. And then as more vendors got into the game, these all became available and you could buy them. You were really only limited by whether or not you could scrounge together enough people to put together a group buy. I mean, that's always going to be a challenge. At this point now, I would say almost everything that I could think of that I want to order, I can order. or I could have ordered if I could have found 49 more people to order it with me. And maybe, you know, that's the limiting factor. But there's a vendor out there for almost everything I can imagine now at this point.

So it has healed to a significant degree. So what is, what, I mean, setting aside the actual, like, aspect of, like, ordering foods and other, like, basic necessities, can you just, like, walk through a little bit about, like, what your day to day life is? Like, do you, are able to get outside? Do you have space? is there room to walk around? Like, what is, or how, what are people doing? Right. So we've had a case in our building in the last seven days, which puts us into the

highest level of secure zone, a controlled zone. In theory, we're not even supposed to leave our doors to the doors to our apartments. But ours, like I think a lot of other buildings, have been operating that on the Honor Code as well, because I still see people going downstairs. there's no security camera at my door or anything like that. I can still go outside and go downstairs. And if I spent a lot of time downstairs hanging out out in the courtyard or something, I'm sure my neighbors would have something to say about me because we're all supposed to be

staying inside our apartments. But there's no actual restriction on walking down and walking around. I'm a volunteer for receiving our delivery. So I get out a lot already. I get to breathe the fresh air and I get to spend a lot of time outdoors. is other people, you know, they've got to walk their dogs or they just want to like get some fresh air. I've seen people going out and spending some time outside. I know other apartment compounds and other apartment communities have differing levels of stringency when it comes to this.

And some places are very strict about not leaving your door at all. What's your sense of the official data that's been out there around cases and supply availability and maybe fatalities as well, versus what you've personally experienced and seen on the ground? Because, of course, when it comes to China, there are always questions and sometimes doubts about the validity of the official data. So I'm curious how your personal experience stacks up against what's been officially reported. I think, you know, I can only speak to my own experience, right? What we've seen is cases that we knew 100% were in our building. or we knew 100% were in our compound.

They showed up, but they took some time, you know, four, five, six days between when we knew that case appeared and we thought that person had been evacuated from the building and brought to a medical treatment center and when that case appeared on the official ledger of our neighborhood, of our district or sub-district. So right now what I can say is I know there's a lag between when cases appear in real life and when that individual case ends up making its way into the big numbers, the official data. Certainly at the beginning, I think based on what we had seen coming out of statistically from other locations that had Omnacron breakouts, it looks like we were, looked like we were seeing a lot of cases with an incompatible number of severe critical cases

and mortality. I would say in the last, you know, I haven't been checking the numbers every single day, but certainly I know in the last few days, those numbers, unfortunately, have been rising. And will they end up, you know, somewhat statistically matching to what we've seen from other locations? I don't know. But certainly I think there's been a lag between what we see and what we observe and when it, you know, eventually shows up in the data. So, I mean, bigger picture, I think that in the U.S., observing what's going on in Shanghai, high. I would say the overwhelming perception is sort of incredulity. Like, I feel like people just don't get it or they don't believe it. And they're like, what am I missing? Because

none of this makes any sense. This is so economically damaging, it would appear. It's so psychologically damaging. It's socially damaging. It seems medically implausible, given the virality of some of the latest ferians to even have a COVID-CO- COVID zero policy. I think people are just like scratching their heads. They don't have strong opinions per se. They're just really baffled. So what would you say like, how do you perceive like the goal here, the strategy and sort of like what, what victory looks like or what the process looks like? How would you describe it to someone? Well, I mean, I think the image of what victory looks like in an ideal world is pretty clear. It's something like what Shenjin did last month,

right? You have a few cases. They pop up. You lock down tighter than a clam. you have excellent local logistics and apparently pretty strong local government support. Everybody puts in their time and then you reemerge with your caseload almost eradicated. And I know the folks in Shenjin are still having, you know, a pretty hefty testing requirement. They're testing every two or three days to make sure they maintain that. But I imagine that's like the platonic ideal for how a Chinese city pursuing its current COVID policy emerges from a, localized municipal COVID outbreak. Now, people are going to be analyzing to death whether or not Shanghai couldn't do it because of local government or because they moved too late or because they

were too liberal or whatever it is. It's clear that Shenjin was the golden standard, and Shanghai has missed that by a long shot. So you can understand the desire to achieve something like Shen Jen. Once it's apparent that the window has closed and the barn door is open and the horse is run away or whatever metaphor you want to use, then the question is, okay, is it a reasonable ask to try to get back to what Shenjin achieved? Opportunity cost? What are we looking at now? Hey, I'm not an epidemiologist or a biologist or a public health expert. So I don't have strong opinions on what will or won't work. I think I do understand what they're hoping for. And I think it made sense when you were considering a Shenzhen-like scenario.

Now that we're in the scenario that Shanghai is in, I don't know what they're supposed to do. I certainly hope somebody with a lot of expertise in that field is considering the different results we've seen so far from Shanghai and wondering, is a course correction necessary? Does it have to be repeated to every other Chinese city that has an Omnacomicon breakout after this? Or is this a Shanghai specific policy? I don't know, but I certainly hope somebody's thinking about it. What's your sense of the sort of broad mood in Shanghai at the moment and support for these policies? Because, again, to Joe's point, if you talk to people in the U.S. or in Europe maybe, they hear about these very strict lockdowns and they don't really get it. They're sort of incredulous about all of it.

But on the other hand, in China, President Xi Jinping, has been very careful about people. pitching this as a way to save lives and saying explicitly that they're doing this in a way that's different to what the West has done, where they're willing to accept fatalities in exchange for, you know, less harsh lockdowns and more individual freedoms. So how do you see that portion of it at the moment? What's the mood like? Yeah, I mean, and again, if you do it as effectively and efficiently as Shen Jen did, you have nothing but takers. Everybody gets that social contract. They say we give up our freedoms for a week or two. We get to squash everything, and then we go back to a fairly high quality life like what we had before. Certainly when this drags on

the way it has for Shanghai, what I've been seeing and hearing is that even people who are generally, I would say, pretty supportive of China's COVID policy over the last two years are saying, well, is Shanghai an exception? If Shanghai is an exception, how can we make it the only exception? Because people are bummed out here. I think that's fair to say that the people in Shanghai are low energy. They understand the intent and they're still supportive of the intent. But increasingly, I feel, at least from the people around me, the people I see in my building WeChat group, things like that, people. are losing, I don't want to say losing enthusiasm for the overall cause, because I think people don't really think like that. I think there's, and I'm just going to go on a ramble tangent here, but I don't think that the people in the midst of a lockdown are really the ones analyzing this

by saying, oh, should China change its policy on zero COVID now, given what I'm going through? No, they're just saying, I'm sick of testing all the time. And I'm sick of being confined to my home. And if you told me zero COVID means we get to do it like Shen Jen, I love zero COVID. And if you told me zero COVID means this, ugh, I don't know how I feel about this. But I don't think people are necessarily processing it as like, oh, yeah, we've got to change the way we think about this now. I think most people are just thinking about it on a daily life basis. And I would say, yeah, they're sick of it. They're sick of being inside. They're sick of whatever this is. And if you want to rebrand it. If you want to call it something else, if you want to say this is dynamic,

zero COVID, or now this is some version of living with it, but we're still trying to get back to zero. However, you brand it, just like make this better, make my life right now better. And then we can talk about how you label it. David, what are people doing who don't have jobs that can be done on a computer? I've got to imagine they're surviving on the largesse of their employers, if possible. If not, then they might be cutting into their savings. I mean, I'm a pretty white-collar guy, and most of the people I know are white-collar, too, so we're all working from home. I know Shenjin had some pretty strict policies back in 2020 when I was there about whether or not employers were allowed to dismiss their employees because they weren't working and what kind of protections were in place for them. And I haven't seen or heard anything about whether there's something equivalent right now in the company.

So, David, we would be remiss if we had you on. and if we didn't talk a little bit about electricity in China as well, because this is your day-to-day job. Speaking of jobs, I want to ask, what's your sense of what's happening with Chinese infrastructure spending at the moment? And I know you're very interested in renewables, but we did have GDP figures released relatively recently, showing a slowdown in growth, which is something you might expect going into lockdown, although the figures actually didn't take that most recent period into account. But do you feel like there's a big wave of fresh infrastructure spending coming to try to offset some of these lockdowns? Or is it basically impossible to do these projects given the current situation?

Well, I'll say if we talk about offsetting sluggish GDP growth with big infrastructure projects, that gets into macroeconomic questions. And I tend to avoid those because I think that's black magic. But I will say from an individual microeconomic perspective, there's massive demand for renewable electricity in China. The government plans for capacity of power and that it has to be green power, renewable power, are staggering. And that the cart would pull the horse in that sense where we say we need to pull up GDP figures

so we're going to increase infrastructure spending. I don't know if that's the right way I'd think about. it, I'd think of it in terms of we are definitely going to build a lot of green energy, a lot of infrastructure associated with green energy, because we want it, because we need it. And then maybe that becomes a thing that actually props up GDP, but not necessarily know the other direction. On the microeconomic level, so many international corporations and grid companies and state-owned enterprises, everybody has these mandates to consume a ton of renewable electricity. And all of the grid infrastructure and all the power plants and everything that goes into making those individual

microeconomic needs achievable and meetable means building a lot of stuff. So I guess if you look at it from that perspective, yeah, sure, a lot of infrastructure spending coming in to be able to meet the green development goals. Is just, you know, in terms of total energy demand, this sort of acute moment. I mean, we've seen global oil prices. Well, they're still very high, but they've come down from recent highs, in part it would seem very likely because of this collapse of Chinese demand for gasoline and other petroleum products while so many people are stuck inside their homes. What do you view as the sort of the size of the current shock to energy demand from these changing consumption patterns and just changing patterns while the lockdown is happening?

well certainly if the lockdown right now is just Shanghai so Shanghai is 25 million people which is actually just a drop in the bucket for China if you see and there's a couple other places that are under lockdown but most of the country is business as usual right now so we're foreseeing reduced energy demand it's probably more macroeconomic stuff more long-term macroeconomic stuff there might be kind of domestic consumption instability or domestic consumption kind of uncertainty that would lead to a bit of a slowdown. But Shanghai individually, I don't think, is going to be driving that. We're going to have to leave it there. I hope that things start to improve for you and your neighbors relatively soon. But thank you so much for coming on all thoughts and walking us through

everything that's been going on in Shanghai. Really appreciate it. Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. So Joe, one thing I was thinking about through all of this was how impossible it would be to do this in the U.S., not just because I think people would sort of intuitively revolt against it, but also because I don't really think we have the technology or the platforms to arrange things like this. Certainly, like, imagine, well, I guess you could Venmo payments, but it just seems like it would be a massive hassle. No, the software wouldn't exist for like the group purchasing or group shopping cards. And I remember, of course, you know, one of the first conversations we had over two years ago with Dan Wong. And some of the other technologies that David was just talking about, like, you know, the idea of like issuing people a different colored basically passport or a different type of license to be out. you know, we would never have this sort of like agility on a sort of like government or neighborhood level to like issue something like that so fast and have people check it for better or worse.

I think most people in the U.S. are probably happy that the government can't quickly like issue all kinds of different passports to people for their neighborhoods. But yeah, there's sort of like a degree of like tech that would make something equivalent almost impossible to imagine in the U.S. Yeah. Yeah, and the other thing that I found interesting was the speed with which it seems like businesses have actually adapted. And you mentioned that you saw that here in New York. I guess I never really saw it in Hong Kong because we didn't have a hard lockdown.

But it was interesting David's description of like the local coffee shop that is now a bulk supplier of coffee beans. Well, I was in Texas for a while during that spring. and like the local Tex-Mex place, they would like sell these kits where instead of like ordering enchiladas, you would get this big tray of like beans and chicken and tortillas to make your own enchiladas. And I thought that was great. I was like, oh, maybe this should be, they should all, maybe this is how it should stay. Like all the restaurants become like meal kit companies. Yeah, this is the other thing I'm wondering how much of the group buying dynamic stays even if lockdown is sort of, you know, if it goes away. Because as I said in the intro, group buying has.

existed in China for a while, and people usually use it to try to get good deals on bulk buying or just try to secure something that's difficult to import without enough people demanding it. I wonder if it becomes even more of a thing. Not specifically related to this, but it's sort of, I forgot that in China, a city of 25 million people, even though it's probably, you know, the most important city economically, is also kind of a drop in the bucket. But, you know, you think it's like, oh, there's this huge hit. It is really big.

But on the other hand, China is just so enormous that from the grand scale of, like, Chinese, you know, goods consumption or energy consumption, it's not, like, it's not a gigantic share, which I. China is just on a different scale to everything else. However, what I would say is there have been a lot of anecdotes about smaller villages in the countryside being locked. completely. There's someone I follow close to Harbin who said the entire village was basically carted off to quarantine. Now there's this talk about Beijing going into lockdown as well. And so, you know, there's a lot going on. China's a big country, but it does seem like there's the potential for this to be a very significant economic hit. Yeah, really, really extraordinary.

And I just can't imagine, I mean, having kids, having pets, as you mentioned, I just, The fact that people are sort of, it strikes me as a very psychologically taxing situation, setting aside even concerns about being able to get food and such. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast.

I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allo. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallwork. Follow our guest, David Fishman on Twitter. He's at Pretentious What? follow our producer Carmen Rodriguez. She's at Carmen Armin. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca Today. And check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle

at podcasts. Thanks for listening.