‘Like a Kafka novel’: Witnessing China’s zero-COVID policy
“You should go home,” warned the restaurant owner, pointing to a surveillance device posted above us on the street. “There’s a lockdown and cameras are everywhere!”
I turned back onto the deserted Shanghai sidewalk and moved on. It was April 1, and I was on my first foray outside my hotel room under China’s zero-COVID-19 regime. After 14 days quarantined in a room with an alarm that sounded whenever I opened the door, I might have been forgiven for enjoying a breath of fresh air. In fact, I was on a mission: to secure food.
Two weeks earlier, I had landed in Shanghai with my husband just as the city of 25 million people was emerging as an epicenter in China’s worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began in Wuhan in late
