![]() ![]() Shanghai residents’ outrage - which they’ve expressed by singing and chanting from their balconies and co-opting anti-American hashtags used by government officials to criticize the US - is born from the fact that the government isn’t providing the stability it promises in exchange for personal freedoms, according to Rui Zhong, program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. ![]() Shanghai’s lockdown, two years into the pandemic, is rivaled only by those in Wuhan in 2020 and Xi’an at the end of last year in terms of strictness. What started as a patchwork of temporary lockdowns to limit the spread of disease quickly turned into an interminable, city-wide shutdown with people only allowed out to take PCR tests, as a New York magazine piece explained earlier this week. The Shanghai outbreak is thus far China’s most serious since the beginning of the pandemic a staggering 200,000 cases have been reported since the outbreak started in March, though that’s likely under-reported, according to the New York Times. We’re going to expect that is going to improve the policy implementation, even though the policy itself is not going to change,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox on Friday. “Even the authoritarian governments, they still have to take this mass reaction into account, or else will lose the cooperation from the society. Although the central government is reportedly stepping up efforts to get supplies to the city, the overall policy is driving many residents to criticize the government’s policy - and Shanghai’s implementation of it - despite serious potential risks to their safety and freedom by doing so. ![]() That has translated into serious struggles for residents, including hourslong ambulance wait times, dwindling savings, and inadequate or rotten food supplies, among others. But the reports coming out of Shanghai suggest that the local government was unprepared for an outbreak in the country’s economic center and cast doubt on the feasibility of zero Covid at this point in the pandemic. The government has touted the zero-Covid strategy, the government’s system of containment using intensive testing and tracing, combined with partial or complete lockdowns when a case is detected, has kept case counts and deaths low over the past two years. The system is so poorly managed that residents are frequently unable to access basic necessities like food, medications, and medical care, prompting fairly widespread, spontaneous protests online and in real life. Shanghai, China’s bustling cosmopolis of 26 million, has been under lockdown since late March under the nation’s strict “dynamic zero-Covid” protocols. ![]()
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