On the corner of Anfu Road and Wulumuqi Road, one of only a handful of places that could stake a claim as the true centre-point of Shanghai, a police vehicle has been parked for over a year. It is smaller than a coach, slightly larger than a riot van and the characters “public” and “security” are written on its side, beneath rows of turned-off red, white and blue lights. The windows are covered by drawn grey blinds, except at the front, where the driver’s seat is empty.
On the many occasions I passed it throughout 2023, the bus had shown no signs of life. But while I was taking a closer look one morning in December, a police officer, invisible from the outside, suddenly alighted. He would have missed me completely had I not asked him why the bus was there. Queries, he replied in an accommodative tone, should be directed to the government Department for Public Security.
The question of why the bus ended up there in the first place, as opposed to why it is still there now, is more clear-cut. On November 24 2022, a fire in the western city of Ürümqi (Wulumuqi in Mandarin), Xinjiang, killed 10 people. On social media, it was blamed on lockdown policies. That weekend, a number of people, hard to estimate but at least in the hundreds, congregated on that same crossroads of Wulumuqi Road in Shanghai — one of many similar gatherings across China. Some chanted anti-government slogans or held up white pieces of paper, a symbol of censorship; others, not quite protesters, simply watched. Police officers soon arrived in vehicles like the one still parked there.
Days later, the government began to unravel its zero-Covid policy, which fully ended on January 8. The archives of the pandemic also ground to a halt; a vast apparatus that had in 2020 been created to record every individual case was suddenly disassembled. The change was so sudden, someone told me, that “it made us feel like we were living in a dream”. The problem with dreams is they tend to make even less sense when you write them down.
A year on from the ending of the policy, how is it now remembered, and how well? Like the pandemic itself, pandemic fatigue is a global phenomenon. But China has its own dynamic. For the government, its control measures, which for years aimed to completely eliminate infection through quarantine and lockdowns, were initially evidence of its legitimacy to govern; after the impossibility of the goal was tacitly admitted against a backdrop of discontent, the memory of the period no longer served any obvious political purpose.
In Shanghai, oral histories of the city’s 2022 lockdown sometimes act as icebreakers for new acquaintances, like the weather. In other circumstances, spontaneous acts of collective remembering break out. Sometimes, the spirit of the age is preserved not in speech but in a physical object, scarcely noticed: a single vehicle parked at the crossroads, say, where the driver’s seat is still wrapped tightly in clingfilm.
Because it was International Women’s Day, Li Hua clearly remembers the moment the university campus on which she worked was locked down: 5pm, March 8 2022. She had by then already left for the day; a colleague notified her by text.
Hua drove to a flat she was renting next to her daughter’s school in the district of Pudong, north of the Huangpu river, just as that too was being locked down. In her telling, her daughter ran out just in the nick of time and together they returned to the family apartment in Xuhui, south of the river. But, three days later, concerned about a lockdown there, they returned to the Pudong apartment. They would stay there for the next 84 days.
In China, lockdown communications were handled through WeChat groups that all residents of a given building joined, and mass PCR-testing was a brief opportunity for them to leave their apartments. On one occasion, Hua wrote on hers that the whole process was “meaningless” and refused to go downstairs to the lobby where the tests were administered unless an end-date was confirmed for the lockdown. The louzhang, the head of the neighbourhood committee (a grassroots organisation within each housing compound that was responsible for implementing the city government’s lockdown policy) agreed with her. No one forced her to do the tests, though she eventually relented.
She remembers she began to like alcohol for the first time in her life, drinking beer and wine at the secret hotpot parties sometimes held in her 500-person building. When she properly went outside in May, the “landscape was all wild” by the Huangpu river. Later, in June, when the Shanghai lockdown was all over, she felt real happiness, standing in a supermarket with so many options available. “I know it’s nothing,” she says, “but it was as if I couldn’t believe myself”.
That night, along with her neighbours, she went out to the street and lit fireworks. A policeman was standing there, and he didn’t stop them; she knew there was an unspoken understanding between them. He watched until the fireworks all went out, and then he said, “I think it’s about time you went home”.
Right afterwards, Hua felt like everyone in the city had become close friends. But she left China and went to America. She would repeat her story to new people she met. As an academic, she tried to archive WeChat conversations — at her suggestion, a PhD student back in China used them for a dissertation, but it was never read by anyone except the examiners.
In 2023, when she remembered an anniversary of something that happened a year ago, she started to post on WeChat and her friends in Shanghai would respond to her. But as spring turned to summer, the engagement declined. “These kinds of voices,” she says, “slowly faded”, even if the period itself had not faded at all.
There are 26mn people in Shanghai, just one of dozens of cities locked down in China between 2020 and 2022, each with their own accounts. Official coverage of the pandemic was carefully controlled. But on social media the unfolding history was at the time richly documented.
One expat couple in Puxi, south of the river, were released after just 11 days because their building met the requirements of an official directive. They frequently ventured out to “hunt down food”, especially for their friends, given that food parcels were allocated by the government based on housing compounds. On an average day, they would see fewer than 10 people outside. There were sometimes tents housing migrant workers, who, in the absence of a neighbourhood committee, faced difficulties acquiring food.
In anticipation of the lockdown, Piet, a Dutch chef, ordered enormous amounts of flour. One day, he woke up to over 100 WeChat friend requests. For weeks, he baked from 8am to midnight; his flat was permanently covered in flour. He earned the trust and business of delivery drivers, who often lacked food, by providing them with free meals through the gates. At one point, security guards started wrapping cling film around the outer perimeters. He had to ring up a client who had purchased a cake. “I’ve got to throw it over the fence,” he said. “That’s fine,” they replied.
Hearsay, the couple recall, “became currency”, as it might in wartime; WeChat was ablaze with rumours, predictions and moments of levity. Once, a pair of escaped peacocks appeared. They were a brief media sensation. Eventually, the couple say, a “peacock catcher came” and caught them, and apparently there was footage of that moment, but they do not have it.
Of the great digital archive of the Shanghai lockdown, much survives. During the event, the records were mass-produced at a rate beyond the capacity of any conceivable censorship, which had to be targeted. A viral video, “the voices of April”, which plays recordings of frantic phone calls between citizens and officials, has been removed from the Chinese internet, but is still available on YouTube. Of photographs or conversations, the vast majority exist in an unpublished state.
I spent a few hours on Baidu, China’s Google, trying to reconstruct the history of the Covid era with no recourse to a VPN. The omissions were smaller than expected. Most of the key dates and events were well-recorded. The Wuhan lockdown, the first result on a search for it explained, “was the first time in human history that such severe epidemic prevention policies have been applied to a city with a population over 10mn people”.
The most striking exception was the “white paper movement” — a term that refers to the kind of gathering that took place on Wulumuqi Road (although it does get some limited traction on Bing). That was what apparently gave rise to the bus, though it was hard to be certain about when exactly it had arrived. I tried various numbers related to the Department for Public Security. Eventually, someone explained that questions could not be answered over the phone, and had to be faxed. The FT faxed a question (why is there a police bus at the corner of Wulumuqi and Anfu Road?). There was no reply. I called again, to see if they could confirm the fax had been received. No such confirmation was possible: the matter would be “handled according to the relevant regulations”.
Ellie, an Australian health professional, left Shanghai in the first year of the pandemic but came back in 2021 and worked instead at her company’s branch in the nearby city of Suzhou. When she attempted to renew her work permit in 2022, it became apparent she had broken the law by using it in the wrong city.
A crime of this nature required a short spell in an immigration detention centre, which was set at five days (there was no court process). But when the day itself came, she was instead taken to a cell in a Suzhou police station.
She recalls that the walls were padded, though by the end she wished it was the floor instead, because there was no bed. She had nothing except for her clothes; the police took her phone, after demanding its unlock code, and her shoelaces. She pleaded for the book in her confiscated bag, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which she eventually received and found herself flying through (though she still only got through a fifth of it). The fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day, and she gauged the passage of time through the arrival of noodle soup for breakfast, which was the only meal she was willing to eat.
After the experience was over, she was driven to the actual immigration centre. There, she was provided with a form that, she was told, she should sign to confirm that she had stayed there and had access to her belongings and an interpreter (she could read it through translation software on her now-returned phone). She was initially outraged, but had already decided to leave the country. As for why she had not been allowed to stay in the designated centre, she could only speculate: Covid-19.
One of the qualities of the zero-Covid era was the sense of a suspension of other priorities — legal norms, open borders, economic targets — against the singularity of the anti-pandemic goal. For certain Chinese citizens, this disrupted their sense of a historical trajectory. Zhang Baiqiang had first applied to emigrate in 2017 but decided to proceed when his approval arrived during the Shanghai lockdown. Overseas, he found casual work in a university, where the professor was teaching a course on Chinese social change post-Mao. It included the topic of the work unit. He found himself thinking of his childhood in Chengdu in the 1970s, when everyone grew up in work units. Food was distributed based on the principles of central planning. How would he describe the work unit? There was no freedom. But it was not an unhappy memory: it was his childhood.
For Baiqiang, the whole period, from Mao’s time to the 2010s, was a process of liberation. It is hard to estimate how many families would also, behind closed doors, be discussing leaving. Money was needed, and even in Chengdu, one of China’s biggest cities, the house prices have generated less wealth for families compared to Shanghai. As with the Covid era itself, the most difficult part related to the older generation. He remembers a conversation with his 87-year-old mother, when she asked him: “Can I change your mind? Can I change your mind?” It was difficult to answer, but eventually, in a low voice, he replied: “no”.
Like a pair of eloped peacocks, history is difficult to track down, even if it is just metres in front of you. I asked someone at the crossroads why the bus was there, but he said he pays no attention to it, and he should not be asked. I asked a woman setting up deckchairs at a coffee shop — she had no idea, nor did she have any view on why the zero-Covid policy ended. I asked a street cleaner, who offered up the following theory: there were too many people around here, and the police needed to rest on the bus. Now he mentioned it, this would explain the curtains, and, if I remember correctly, the police officer’s slightly dazed look. I asked a student who had been up all night there last year: “maintain stability,” she replied. I asked a colleague what she thought. “Someone sent it there,” she said, “and didn’t ask it to leave”.
It was strange to think that the bus might be better explained by what was not said than by what was. As for the wider era, the act of recording was not only skewed through networks of limited representation (there were people 100 metres away from the protests when they were happening who were completely uninterested in them) but also in the framing of the questions (I asked one friend what was the most shocking thing he encountered during the lockdown. “My mother-in-law’s cooking,” he instantly replied. “She was locked in with us”). Then there was the subject matter itself: isolation, one of the starring characters in the entire play, has by its very nature the fewest lines.
Covid prevention measures were not unique to China, even if it had its own ceremonies and legal codes. Nor was the pattern of formerly paused activities being resumed. One Sunday morning in May, while entering a park in Shanghai, I heard a familiar roar. I knew that sound; there was only one possible explanation, even if it was unusual timing for a football match, and the stadium was not yet visible.
There was no stadium and no match. Around the corner there was instead a group of old people, perhaps in the hundreds, gathered close to a fountain. It could not simply be said that they were singing, because the motion of their bodies was somehow also in complete concert. The anthem was first released in the 1950s, a period well-known for its traumas. But the old cadence was unforgotten and joyful, the grass plains of the lyric were almost visible, and for a moment you could say: yes, of course, that was how it was, there is the unrecorded history, not just of then but of now, aloft on the breeze.
Some names have been changed. Thomas Hale is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent
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