To stop the spread of the coronavirus much of China has effectively shut down. What’s not been fully appreciated is how extensive the closures are. By our calculations 760 million are living under some kind of residential lockdown. nytimes.com/2020/02/15/bus…
It’s one of the largest social control experiments ever anywhere, even in China. To do it, Beijing is relying on local party officials, police, and busybodies known as grid workers. They’ve effectively closed down many cities to outsiders. This is a station at a closed city: Yiwu
There are blocks of all kinds. Some cities don’t let anyone in who doesn’t have a fixed address. Some force outsiders into 14 day quarantines. Building complexes have checkpoints. Some don’t allow guests. Others limit how often people can leave with makeshift passes like below. 
Likely more than 100 mln people are being limited to how often they can leave their apartment. Rules can be random, enforcement arbitrary. That’s what happens when you have so many grassroots communist party types enforcing rules. At a village level, many have set up barricades.
So what kind of numbers are involved to pull this off? The grid network cuts up China into tiny quadrants. A person in each area keeps tabs on people. It’s the human part of the surveillance state. Normally it’s quite irrelevant. Not anymore. Huge manpower has been mobilized.
In Zhejiang, 330K grid workers are on the job, basically more than 1 for every 200 people in a province of 60 mln. Guangzhou has 177k, Hubei has 170k, Sichuan has 308k and Chongqing has 118k. They do everything from manning checkpoints to delivering food to the quarantined.
At first cadres let Bob Huang leave his house once every two days. He pulled some strings and got an exemption. Nearby is a land of fiefdoms. One village only lets in those who speak their dialect. An immigrant hiked 4 days to get around roadblocks. nytimes.com/2020/02/13/wor…
Bob said volunteers helped call police and run down a drunk man who stayed out overnight. They also delivered a Happy Meal to a quarantined kid. They’re part warden, part caretaker. It’s a setup reminiscent of Mao’s mass mobilizations. Rules are very arbitrary and inconsistent.
The reason this happens is a sort of bureaucratic chain reaction. “The central government put huge pressure on local officials. That triggered competition between regions, and local gov’ts turned from conservative to radical,” said one expert. That’s how you get checks like this:
“Even when the situation is relieved...the machine is unable to change direction or tune down.” Indeed. Local officials are in an impossible position. Beijing has told them to restart the economy AND fight a people’s war agains the virus. Meanwhile the CCP is punishing laggards.
Walking back a mass mobilization will be tricky and undoubtedly take time and trust. Meanwhile there are consequences. Village roadblocks inhibit transport. Checkpoints scare those who should be checked. No idea how this all plays out, but China wil be different after.
