‘Let’s not talk about It’: 5 years on, China’s Covid shadow lingers

Bit by bit, the traces of Shanghai’s coronavirus lockdown in 2022 have disappeared from around Fu Aiying’s stir-fry restaurant. The smell of rotten eggs, from when officials carted her off to quarantine without letting her refrigerate her groceries, is long gone. The testing booths manned by workers in hazmat suits have been dismantled.

Even her neighbors have moved away from the century-old neighborhood that had one of the city’s highest infection rates. Soon, the neighborhood itself will vanish: Officials have slated it for demolition, saying that its cramped houses had helped the virus spread. Fu’s restaurant is one of the few businesses still open, in a row of darkened storefronts and caution signs taped to doorways.

But the boarded-up windows have done little to contain the emotional legacy of that time: a grueling, monthslong lockdown of 26 million people. Some residents, who had prided themselves on living in China’s wealthiest city, found themselves unable to buy food or medicine. They wondered when they might be dragged off to quarantine, forcibly separated from their children.

Fu spent 39 days in a mass quarantine center, with no idea of when she’d be allowed out. After she was finally released into the still-locked-down city, she had to sneak into her restaurant for rice and oil, because she didn’t have enough food at home.

She felt like a part of her had been permanently dulled. “Since my time in quarantine, I don’t have a temper anymore. I don’t have a personality anymore,” said Fu, 58, tearing up.

Perhaps no country was as deeply reshaped by the pandemic as China, where the outbreak began in the central city of Wuhan five years ago. For three years afterward, longer than anywhere else, the Chinese government sealed the country’s borders. In the final year, 2022, it declared an especially harsh “zero-tolerance” policy for infections, imposing lockdowns like the one in Shanghai nationwide. Officials insisted on the restrictions even as the rest of the world decided to reopen and live with the virus.

Years later, the shadow of that experience still lingers. In another Shanghai neighborhood, which held the dubious distinction of being locked down the longest — 91 days — one woman said shortages during that time had once forced her to pay $11 for a head of cabbage. She now stockpiles at least a week’s worth of groceries.

Another woman, Yan Beibei, a college counselor in her 30s, once planned to buy a house in Shanghai’s more affordable outskirts. But during the lockdown, her neighbors helped ensure that she had food. Now she wants to stay near people she trusts, even if that means delaying homeownership.

“You have to figure out which places feel safer,” she said.

Before the pandemic, the ruling Communist Party’s controls could feel distant to many Chinese, or a worthwhile trade-off for the country’s huge economic gains. But the lockdowns made clear that the party was willing to sacrifice those gains, and people’s safety more broadly, at the whims of one man, Xi Jinping.

Local governments spent tens of billions of dollars on testing, vaccination, payments to health care workers and other related costs in 2022 alone, according to incomplete budget reports. Still struggling to recover financially, some localities have delayed payments to civil servants or cut benefits to retirees. Hospitals have gone bankrupt.

Ordinary people are hesitant to spend money, too. Many saw their savings dwindle as the lockdowns forced companies and factories to shut down. Empty storefronts are a common sight even in major city centers. Fu, the restaurant owner, said business was half what it had been before the pandemic.

Still, Fu did not want to dwell on her memories. “Even thinking about it is painful,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it.”

The silence may be a coping mechanism for some residents. But it is also carefully enforced by the Chinese government. The restrictions at times set off intense public anger, including the biggest protests in decades.

The government has worked to squelch any discussion about its response to the pandemic, let alone attempts to reckon with it. Art exhibits about the lockdowns have been shut down. Even today, many social media users use code words like “face mask era” to avoid censorship.

The government has also not pulled back much of the expanded surveillance it introduced then. It has urged cities to hire more neighborhood workers who were in charge of tracking residents’ movements during the pandemic, to strengthen monitoring of public sentiment.

On Shanghai’s Urumqi Road, where some of the biggest protests occurred, in 2022, a police truck is still parked at a busy intersection of hip boutiques and restaurants. Some workers at businesses there declined to discuss the pandemic, citing the political sensitivity.

But silence is not the same thing as forgetting. Many Chinese were shaken by the seeming arbitrariness of the restrictions as well as the abruptness of the government’s decision, in December 2022, to end them. The government had not stockpiled medicine or warned medical professionals before doing so, and hospitals were overwhelmed as infections skyrocketed.

The mother of Carol Ding, a 57-year-old accountant, fell sick in that wave. Ding managed to secure her mother a much-sought-after hospital bed — other patients slept in the hallways or were turned away, Ding recalled — but the hospital didn’t have enough medicine. Her mother died.

“If you had so much power to lock people down, you should have the power to prepare medicine,” Ding said.

She added that time had done little to ease her emotional pain. “I think it’ll take at least 10 years for all this to go away or be diluted,” she said.

To the casual observer, these pandemic aftershocks may not be immediately evident. Tourists once again stroll Shanghai’s glittering Bund waterfront. Hipster coffee shops and soup dumpling joints are again drawing long lines of customers.

The apparent bustle, though, masks a struggling economy. With well-paying jobs hard to find, more and more people have turned to gig work. But their earnings have fallen as their ranks have grown. And they’re scrambling for fewer and fewer dollars as people cut down on spending.

Lu Yongjie, who runs a parcel delivery station in a working-class neighborhood of Shanghai, said shipping companies once paid him 20 cents per package. That has now fallen to about 14 cents, he said.

Still, he had to accept the lower prices: “If you don’t do it, someone else will.”

If there is a cure for China’s post-Covid hangover, it may lie with what propelled the country’s prepandemic rise: the doggedness and ambition of ordinary people, like Marco Ma, a 40-year-old restaurant owner.

Since the pandemic, Ma had shut down four of the six locations of his Korean street food restaurant. His fourth-grade son, once a star pupil, now struggled with paying attention, which Ma attributed to extended online schooling. He kept expecting the next year to be better, but in reality, business only got worse.

Still, “I think 2025 will be a turning point,” he said. “You grab onto whatever pieces of news or whatever to cheer yourself up. What can you do? You have to keep living.”