Thread by @WilliamYang120

By @vwang3: "So when a hotel employee woke me up a little after 7 a.m. to explain that we were not allowed to step outside for four days, my initial disorientation quickly turned to resignation.

Of course this happened. I live in #China." nytimes.com/2022/10/01/wor…

"A sense of possible disaster always lurks, driven by the experiences of Shanghai and other cities, where sudden lockdowns have left residents without food or medicine. A friend bought a second freezer so she could stock up on groceries."

"Yet the policies have been in place for so long, and with so little sign of easing, that navigating them feels — if not normal — at least routine."

"The disruptive becomes typical; the once-unimaginable, reality. The pandemic has imposed new rituals around the world, but in China, the extremes make that process more unsettling."

"The most obviously jarring aspects, for me, were technological. China under “zero Covid” is a web of digital codes. At the entrance to every public space — restaurants, apartment complexes, even public restrooms — ...

... is a printed-out QR code that people must scan with their phones to log their visit."

"What actually determines the color of your code, though, is nebulous. When a banking scandal prompted protests in Henan Province this year, officials manipulated protesters’ health codes to block them from gathering.

The morning in August that a colleague and I were scheduled to fly from the southern city of Guangzhou to Shanghai, her code suddenly, without explanation, turned yellow, meaning she could not board the plane. "

"Some features of Covid-era China are testaments to human creativity. The Guangzhou Library offers book sterilizing machines, which look like high-tech refrigerators.

My favorite invention is the “temporary quarantine area,” where anyone deemed a potential health risk while in public can be deposited until medical care arrives."

"It is possible to avoid the endless testing — by simply not going anywhere. In a part of Guangzhou dominated by warrens of small-scale textile factories, one worker told me he hadn’t noticed the city’s testing requirement to go outside the district.

He and his friends rarely left it anyway, sleeping in dormitories close to the factories and lounging at a nearby lemon tea shop on their days off. Factory owners were supposed to check for up-to-date test results when hiring, but few did, he said."

"Signs of the slowdown are everywhere. Taxi drivers offer unprompted assessments of how thin traffic is. In the food court near my office in Beijing, many of the stalls have gone dark, leaving diners at the surviving shops to eat in a spooky half-glow."

"For many Chinese, the past few years of the pandemic have stirred the spectrum of emotions from anger to frustration to grief. But the first word many people reach for, when I ask how they feel, is helplessness.

“What’s the point in getting myself upset?” a single mother in Shenzhen, who had been locked down several times and worried about affording her son’s tuition fees, said. It wouldn’t change anything."

"The Chinese internet is an endless reservoir of dark humor about the Covid rules, especially from people experiencing the harshest conditions. A user in Xinjiang recently posted a video captioned, ...

... “They sent us instruments in quarantine,” in which she banged a rock-hard biscuit against a table in time to an electronic beat."