What Returning to China Taught Me About China
Illustrations by Ben Hickey
Four days into my COVID-prevention quarantine at a Shanghai hotel, I heard someone knock on the door. Like my fellow travelers at the facility, I wasn’t allowed to interact with anyone during my weeks of isolation, except the medical officers tasked with monitoring my health. An unexpected visit could mean bad news. I had been tested that morning. Could the results have been positive?
I opened the door to find the elderly gentleman who had administered the earlier COVID test. He said nothing, pointed an infrared thermometer at my forehead, and shuffled off with a grunt. I was safe, at least for the moment.
The fear I felt then has been constant since I returned to China three months ago. It hovers in the back of my mind; it keeps me awake at night. The fear isn’t of the virus itself. It’s that the next knock will come from one of the health officials, community wardens, or security officers who enforce China’s strict pandemic controls and have the power to drag me into any quarantine, at any facility, for any length of time, at any time. It’s the fear of being suddenly locked into my apartment, without access to food. My fear—the fear of the millions experiencing harsh lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere in China—is the fear of the arbitrary.
China under Communist Party rule has always been an autocracy with overwhelming repressive capabilities. But in the era of Xi Jinping, the state has been empowered to tighten its grip on society and equipped with enhanced surveillance technology to make that possible. The pandemic has offered the state further rationale and opportunity to expand this power. Ever since the government squashed the initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan more than two years ago, keeping COVID cases at zero has been touted at home and abroad as a mark of Chinese greatness. To maintain that success, the bureaucracy has erected new controls and regulations, implemented through technology that
