On 23rd January 2020, China imposed a lockdown on Wuhan, a city of 11m people, in an effort to control an outbreak of a novel corona virus, Covid-19. The country had experience of such events: in November 2002, a virus that originated in bats had jumped to humans in Guangdong Province after travelling through a civet cat, an animal often sold in live markets to a public that believes that eating wild animals is good for the health. Sars, which had a relatively low transmission rate but a high fatality rate, was contained by the following July, but left deep scars on Chinese society.
The Wuhan lockdown seemed both decisive and dramatic, but in fact it came after a month of obfuscation, censorship and delay that had lethal consequences for China and the world.
In March, as Xi Jinping made a belated propaganda visit to Wuhan, an interview was published with Dr Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital. In it, she described sharing with colleagues an image of a diagnostic report of a patient with Sars coronavirus on 30th December 2019.
The following day, the Wuhan authorities issued a statement concerning an outbreak of “pneumonia” in the city. There was no evidence, it said, of human-to-human transmission. Fen and eight of her colleagues were sanctioned for “spreading rumours”.
By early March, four doctors in the hospital had died after contracting Covid. One of them, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, became a national popular hero, a symbol of a righteous figure who died defending integrity and truth against corruption.
After the December warning, the Wuhan authorities had been focussed on promoting Xi’s latest political messages and on the meeting of the local people’s congress that closed on 9th January. People were returning to their homes as Chinese New Year approached, and the Wuhan authorities were loath to abandon plans for a mass dining event on 18th January. It went ahead, attended by tens of thousands of people.
Under the surface of what seemed like normal city life, the virus spread, unchecked. By the time the lockdown was announced, it had long escaped Wuhan and begun its devastating journey around the world. Over the next three years, more than seven million people would die, millions more would suffer long-term effects, businesses would go under, jobs would be lost, education would be disrupted, economies would crash and societies would undergo profound disruptions, the effects of which are still playing out.
A few independent journalists dedicated themselves to reporting reality in Wuhan, describing overflowing hospitals and long queues at crematoria. They were eventually detained and their accounts erased from the public record in China. Chinese citizens came under unprecedented state control, their movements dictated by their Covid status. One contact in an apartment block was enough to trigger mass lockdown. An app on everyone’s phone delivered red, yellow or green codes that determined whether a citizen could carry on as usual or be forcibly confined. Overzealous officials forced families into vast isolation centres, but often failed to ensure food supplies or care for patients with other conditions.
We may never know exactly how the virus travelled from the bat caves of western China to Wuhan. The Chinese government has obstructed efforts, including those of the World Health Organisation, to establish the origin of the deadliest pandemic in 100 years. Scientists and researchers continue to debate whether the Huanan live market or the two laboratories in the city, one of which was conducting gain-of-function experiments with bat viruses, is the most likely source.
For the Chinese Communist Party, preserving its image called for industrial levels of propaganda. The official story today is that China was the victim. Depending which version you choose, the virus was imported on food packaging or brought to Wuhan by the US military. Rising to the challenge, China scored a heroic victory against Covid-19, confirming the superiority of the communist party’s governance and the wisdom of its leader.
In this version, China suffered few deaths and was a generous donor of vaccines to poorer countries. In fact, western vaccines, which China refused to use, were more effective. Its own population was less protected and its donations abroad were less than half those of the US. The Chinese death rate has been obscured, but is credibly estimated that two million died between December 2022 and January 2023 alone, after China lifted its strict controls. “Zero Covid”, which involved two years of constant testing and repeated lockdowns, was ruinously expensive and has left a burden of debt on China’s local and provincial governments that is contributing to the current economic gloom.
Citizens remember those who were left to starve in lockdown, people locked in a burning building in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, and those who died in a quarantine bus crash in Guizhou Province. They remember, too, the arbitrary use of power as pets were seized and killed; and officials pre-emptively assigned red codes, restricting the movements of entire populations, or, as in the case of a bank protest in Henan, misused red codes to prevent citizens from travelling.
The policy of “dynamic zero” mandated constant lockdowns and culminated in a particularly scarring lockdown in Shanghai in 2022. By November that year, when the rest of the world had largely returned to normal, protesters took to the streets in China, many holding blank sheets of paper, in protest against continuing restrictions, official lies and censorship. In December, “dynamic zero” was abandoned and Covid was allowed to sweep through an under-protected population.
Millions of ordinary citizens had directly experienced the raw power of the state and a brutal reality that contrasted sharply with the official story. Today, China is suffering a collective form of long Covid, evident in the economic, political and social aftermath of the pandemic. Some of its symptoms are a mistrust of official stories, a more deeply entrenched suspicion of the outside world and long-lasting economic effects.
To see the outlines of this changed China, it helps to turn away from propaganda, with its cheerful stories of achievement and muscular nationalism, and look at China’s contemporary literature, which tends to be populated with losers and cynics, corrupt cadres, disillusioned young people and a deep pessimism about the future. The pandemic may prove to mark a watershed, when the massive disruptions that rapid development had brought to Chinese society—accepted when most people felt the tide was rising—began to be questioned as problems crowded in.
Similar emotions are suggested in recent opinion surveys, which reveal that less than a third of respondents believed that hard work would pay off. They are evident, too, in the quietly growing numbers of protests, in fleeting social media posts and memes. Perhaps they are also there in the alarming surge of deadly and random attacks: in 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 were killed and 40 injured. Last year, 166 people were injured and 63 people killed, 35 of them in November when a man drove his car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai. Days later, another drove into a crowd of children and their parents outside a primary school, and a student killed eight and injured 17 in a campus stabbing spree.
Five years on from the first belated lockdown, China seems more depressed, isolated and xenophobic than it was before the pandemic. There are dramatically fewer foreign residents in China, fewer foreign students and less incoming investment. Businesses have relocated to other destinations, such as Singapore, and visitor numbers are low, despite the efforts of the government to encourage tourism with selective visa-free travel.
Much of the current mood can be attributed to the slowdown of the Chinese economy. While Covid was not the only cause, it was an important factor and had long-lasting effects: cash-strapped local and provincial governments saw economic activity strangled and had to carry the crippling costs of constant compulsory testing and lockdowns while also suffering the shock of revenues from real estate turning negative. One estimate put the cost of a year’s mass testing for roughly 500m citizens in excess of $257bn. Another analyst pointed out that adding the cost of personnel would bring that figure to closer the nation’s military budget of $300bn. On top of that, they bore the cost of quarantine camps, and several authorities hastily built emergency hospitals that were little used: Guangzhou for example, spent more than $200m on a single facility with 90,000 beds. Today, several local authorities are reported to be imposing salary cuts on their staff.
With high youth unemployment, graduates have been forced to take jobs delivering takeaway food—and, in contrast to earlier years, less than a third of those surveyed about this believe that the hard work will pay off. Many have already concluded that the system is unlikely to reward their efforts and opted out. Five years on, while the government may insist that the pandemic proved the superiority of their system of government, the people seem less persuaded.
