The History of China - Shanghai Update (09/01/22): Lockdown Eternal

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Let the state be small and the people few: So that the people… fearing death, will be reluctant to move great distances and, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them. So that the people��� Will find their food sweet and their clothes beautiful, will be content with where they live and happy in their customs. Though adjoining states be within sight of one another and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one can be heard in the next, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Shanghai Update, September 1st, 2022.

Lockdown Eternal. It has, happily enough, been a good long while since I've felt compelled to post yet another of these real-time missives. That's largely because over the summer we've been relatively, and the keyword here is relatively, free to move around and go about our respective businesses here in Shanghai. Now, going to anywhere else in China, that's a whole other story. We are still treated like the world's biggest leper colony, and many cities and localities still will simply turn away people with a Shanghai ID or people who've even been logged as been in Shanghai effectively at the border. That is ongoing, although that is starting to loosen,

given that, well, we'll get into more of why in just a little bit, but mostly because more and more localities across China are experiencing the kind of issues that we have already experienced here. That relative freedom, for the most part, has nevertheless been marred here and again by the occasional snap lockdowns hither and thither, which we'll get to more in just a little bit, but still nothing so terrible or disruptive as the full-on citywide lockdowns of last April and May. That is certainly not to say, however, that things have been hunky-dory, nor that they've returned to anything approaching any sort of normality as we used to understand it. Rather, it seems that some sort of new plateau of new normality has been reached, one of constant tracking.

This tracking is done via an ID-bound and phone-accessible app that you scan in order to get tested. Oh yes, the testing. The testing goes on. All the testing. All the time. They at least decided that nasal testing was a great way to get people just about ready to rebel outright, and so now they're sticking to just mouth swabs. But it's constant. Over the summer, you can expect to need them every 48 to 72 hours if you wanted to go anywhere, or enter a store, or take a cab cab or ride the metro. Beyond that, you'd set off something like alarm bells or stormtroopers would come running or something like that. I don't know. I never actually tried my luck with any of that. I mostly just

stayed home. And that was because it was god-awfully hot outside. Who wanted to go outside anyway? Even so, that seemed to kind of normalize in the public mind after a while. It even started to seem alright. Maybe even livable? I should have known, and I guess my amygdala always kind of did, that it couldn't, wouldn't last. As we headed through the absolute worst August of all time, thanks to our world-record 70-plus-day-long heatwave

that literally dried up China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang, we began to gear up and get ready to head back for our next school year. We all prayed and pleaded to whatever deity or force that you might, that things just might be looking up. I mean, after all, we were scheduled to head back to physically teach and have students learn at school on campus. But I think deep down, we all really knew better than that by this point. Upon getting back to school, we staff were informed right off the bat that a sweeping new series of measures had been put into place by the district police. Yes, in spite of the ongoing popular idea that China is some top-down, nationalized, super-hyper-imperial regime,

even a directly administered city like Shanghai cannot even still so much as manage to put together a city-wide policy, and instead continue to devolve it into district levels and below. Yes, yes, the old saying goes, heaven is vast and the emperor is far away, and to add to that, he's busy, busy, busy right now preparing for his rubber stamp re-election. In any event, we were informed that once students were back, they, and we, could all look forward to being required to test every 24 hours. Later, it was confirmed that every day, part of the day would be to lead the

students by their hundreds down en masse to take their tests on site. And I have to assume that if one of those tests ever comes back as positive, we'll all be locked down then and there right on campus. I mean, it's happened before right in my very own school. And it continues to happen across the city at places like the various Ikeas, for instance, that against all odds somehow managed to draw the quote-unquote customers who never ever seem to buy anything and just lay on the sofas and beds all day no matter what the staff says or does. You can find videos of crowds of people busting their way out of those Ikea lockdowns with just sheer brute panicked force, since they had absolutely no intention of spending the next several days inside a freaking Ikea. I feel about 90-95% certain

that that will definitely happen on my campus again at some point this school year, and I'm just not quite sure I can adequately mentally deal with that particular degree of nightmare once again. Oh, and, just as a little cherry on top, the school staff can no longer get deliveries of any kind to school campus at all. So that's just one more utterly arbitrary stick in the eye by the local government. You know, for the healthy. We were not allowed to actually have the students return to school until just today, again by completely arbitrary fiat, meaning that we had to go a week and a half of e-learning yet again before totally switching gears back to on-site learning. But here's where it gets really good, because the day before we were to resume on-campus

work, that is two days ago, the day before the students returned, my building, not my compound mind you, but my specific building was itself locked down because someone had been found to be in close contact with someone else who might have tested positive, blah, blah, blah. Who can really care about the details? Long story short, everyone here got to sit on their laurels for the next two days under observation and testing. Testing. Can't forget about the testing. This meant, of course, that I spent the first day back in class at home. E-teaching from my bed to my students in my classroom. With a TA there to, I don't know, serve as a physical proxy, I guess,

and make sure they didn't burn the place down or whatever. Well, surely with all this hyper-disruptive, hyper-expensive rigmarole, that must mean that China's COVID zero policy is at least working, right? Nope. Cases just keep springing up all over the country, from Shenzhen to Tianjin, from Beijing to Lhasa. Just now I saw the reports coming out of Chengdu that the entire city of 21 million was going into a full-scale lockdown, with all the usual panic. But hey, it's just for three days. Three days and then out. Just three days. Just like Shanghai was only locked down for four days. Four days and out. Just four days. No need to panic. Trust the system.

Well, the people are not buying it. Or rather, they are. Literally. Leading up to this latest lockdown, the entire city of Chengdu's markets and stores have been stripped bare. It's rather incredible to see. I don't even know if I ever saw Shanghai look the way that I've seen photos and reports out of Sichuan as of today. I mean, I guess they've learned. Get it all now before it's gone, because those assurances of it's only a few days, don't panic, aren't worth the airwaves they're spoken on.

Honestly, this game of whack-a-mole is never going to end, it's never going to go away, and why would it? Prohibitive costs aside, all of which can be devolved upon the cities and perhaps eventually onto the populace itself, plans for which have already been given trial balloons to many a popular raspberry, I can tell you. In spite of all that, it's an amazing new system of tracking, command, and control. An incredible new means of making sure that your populace stays exactly where they should be and doesn't go anywhere that they shouldn't. And if they cause any kind of trouble, it's a nearly airtight way to disappear just about anyone in the name of testing positive and public health. It really brings to life that old preferred interpretation of the Hongwu Emperor from the Tao Te Ching.

To quote, Let the state be small and the people few, so that the people, fearing death, will be reluctant to move great distances, and even if they have boats and carts, will not use them, so that the people will find their food sweet and their clothes beautiful, will be content where they live and happy in their customs. Though adjoining states be within sight of one another, and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one can be heard in the next, yet the people of one state will grow old and die

without having had any dealings with those of another. End quote. Anyways, I just felt the need to put something else out there into the ether about this ongoing, never-ending, spiraling madness, before it, too, gets lost down the memory hole of the global news cycle, as it certainly will. But I think that's all, at least for now. Your regularly scheduled episode will soon follow. Never fear. But until then, good night and good luck.

And as always, thanks for listening. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.