It’s now been exactly one year since China gave up its extraordinary public health campaign against Covid. It used to be the only thing people spoke about, and now it barely gets mentioned. And yet the effects will linger on for a long time.
What can be called China's "Zero Covid Era" lasted from January 2020 to December 2022. Future historians will remember it as a milestone in China's social and political history. I lived in China through most of that time, except for the first nine months of 2020, when I was stuck abroad as a direct consequence of the Zero Covid measures.
The policies enacted to quash Covid ended up profoundly affecting the lives of everyone in China, mine included. As a foreign citizen, my experience certainly differed from that of Chinese nationals in some respects. But the reality is that, apart from the occasional extra scrutiny I faced as a foreigner, the effect of government policy on my daily life was not dissimilar to what it might have been for any other middle-class inhabitant of Beijing.
Below I summarise my experiences during the pandemic, especially as they relate to China's measures against Covid.
2020 - China defeats Covid
I happened to travel back to Britain in mid-January 2020, just before Covid became global news, for what I thought would be a two-week vacation over the Chinese New Year holidays. On the way back I stopped over in Qatar for two days. I remember first hearing about this new virus in Wuhan while reading the news in my hotel in Doha. At the time this didn't worry me at all; after all, a couple of months earlier some cases of the bubonic plague had popped up in Inner Mongolia. Not in my wildest dreams could I imagine what was about to happen.
During my stay with my parents in London, the new Coronavirus in China suddenly became international news, especially after Wuhan was put in lockdown on January 23rd. I remember my parents' cleaning lady refusing to come to their house because she knew that I had recently arrived from China ("I have to think about my children" were her words). I suppose actual Chinese people in Britain were facing even more of this kind of suspicion. I also remember buying a pack of masks and sending them to a Chinese friend in Guizhou, who found it impossible to get hold of any.
When I heard that my workplace in Beijing was asking staff to work from home after the holidays, I decided to postpone my return, and cancelled my flight back to China. This seemed like a sensible decision at the time. For some reason, I still couldn't believe this would become a global pandemic. Perhaps the memory of the SARS pandemic of 2003, which was centred in China and petered out with a whimper in the rest of the world, lulled me into a false sense of security.
In early February I travelled to Italy. Italians still didn't seem too worried in general, but the only Chinese restaurant in the small town where I grew up was deserted, since people were stupidly afraid of going there (a few days later, a group of locals organised an event there to show their solidarity). When I was in the airport in Rome, ready to fly back to London, I saw a young couple (not Chinese) wearing masks, and I remember thinking how strange it was to see that in Europe.
In late February, realising that my colleagues would not be going back to the office for a while, I took off to Indonesia, planning to work remotely from a time zone closer to China, travel and learn some Indonesian at the same time. When the situation normalised in China I would go back, I reasoned. It still wasn’t clear at this point that the whole world was going to shut down within a few weeks.
By mid-March, the pandemic had reached Indonesia (and everywhere else). The streets of Yogyakarta, the city where I had based myself, emptied out. Most countries in the region closed their borders. The whole thing seemed unreal, as if a world war had been declared.
By this point it was clear that China had managed to contain the virus better than most countries, and I was wondering whether I should go back. But the idea of having to do 14 days of strict hotel quarantine still seemed outlandish to me, and the news that people in China were now afraid of foreigners infecting them also didn't exactly encourage me to rush back.
On the 27th of March, just as I had almost decided to return to Beijing, it was announced that starting the following day all foreign citizens would be barred from entering China, even if they held valid visas. Only diplomats and those who possessed permanent residence certificates (which are rare) would be allowed in.
At this point I was stuck outside of China, with no idea when I would be able to go back. I found it quite unfair that I was barred from returning, given that I worked and paid taxes in China and that Chinese citizens were still being allowed to fly home (although flights were getting cancelled all the time and the costs could be absurd).
Considering that the great majority of those who were flying to China were already Chinese citizens, there was no way that allowing a few foreigners in would overwhelm quarantine facilities. The measure seemed political rather than medical, and it was ironic given that the Chinese authorities had been strongly protesting other countries' travel restrictions against their own citizens just a month or two earlier. Most other countries in Asia were still allowing long-term foreign residents to enter.
In any case, I settled down in Yogyakarta, unable to go back to China and unwilling to go back to London, where a massive Covid outbreak was taking place. I ended up staying in Indonesia for quite a while. Luckily Yogyakarta avoided both strict lockdown measures and serious Covid outbreaks during the time I was there.
The months passed, and China was giving little sign of opening its borders to foreigners again. I would have needed a special invitation letter from the government to get a visa, but the NGO where I worked did not have that kind of clout. By August, just as I had given up on returning, it was announced that Europeans would again be allowed to enter China. The offer of a meaningful new job in Beijing and the fact that the pandemic was only getting worse in Indonesia convinced me to go back.
The only catch was that I needed a new visa, and the Chinese consulates in Indonesia still refused to give me one without an invitation letter. Apparently they hadn't got the memo. Other countries in Asia would not let me in, so I was forced to first fly to Europe, get a new visa, and then fly back to China from there.
I flew to China from the Netherlands, where I had gotten my new Chinese visa. The only flights operating went from Amsterdam to Xiamen, and they cost 2,600 USD. I ended up quarantining for 14 days in a hotel room in Xiamen. The experience wasn't terrible. The worst part was the tests, which were administered every few days and included blood tests and highly unpleasant nose swabs that were done way longer and deeper than normal. Also there was a lingering fear of testing positive, which would have meant a horrid few weeks locked in a small hospital room with two other people. But the hotel was comfortable and not crazy expensive, and we were able to get food and supplies delivered from outside.
After two weeks I was escorted to the airport and put on a flight to Beijing (staying in Xiamen would have meant another week of quarantine, per local rules). On my arrival in Beijing, I had to learn to navigate Zero Covid China. At the time this wasn't too difficult. After the initial scare, life had more or less gone back to normal. Travelling in and out of the country had become a huge ordeal, but once you were within its borders your life was unlikely to be impacted by the health measures. Everything was open, mass testing was not yet a feature of daily life, and it was rare to spot a dabai.
Health apps were already a thing, but relatively few places actually asked you to scan a QR code. More importantly you were unlikely to see your health code go from green to yellow, or even the dreaded red. New outbreaks were usually limited to single cases here and there, and they were always nipped in the bud. A few unlucky people would end up in a quarantine centre for 14 days, but the chances of it happening to you were remote.
Travel within China was also pretty normal. In December 2020 I went to Tengchong, in Yunnan, for a yoga retreat. The only annoying thing was that the local government demanded that all the foreign participants (as well as the Hong Kongers!) do a PCR test before flying there, while the Mainland Chinese in the group didn't have to. This was in spite of us all, of course, living in China. In order to get a PCR test in Beijing I had to go to a hospital, queue up outdoors for two hours in the cold, and pay 60 Yuan.
In Tengchong, a small town near the border with Myanmar, things were even more relaxed. Unlike Beijing, it was rare to see people masked. Most of the locals probably thought of the Covid pandemic as something that was over in China, and only existed in that nebulous outside world they heard about on TV.
Most of Chinese society appeared to be full of pride over China's handling of the pandemic. The general attitude was that while governments in the rest of the world, and especially America, had failed to take Covid seriously, China had protected its people and defeated the virus thanks to its superior system.
The fact that the pandemic had begun in Wuhan had been conveniently swept under the rug as an embarrassment, with the official line being that nobody knew where or how the virus originated. There were also plenty of conspiracy theories about how Covid had actually started in America, and the authorities were quite happy to let them spread.
Covid-related xenophobia was one side-effect of this wave of national pride. The fear of "irresponsible" foreigners bringing the virus back into China had subsided considerably since the Spring, but it was still there when I went back. Foreigners travelling around the country often faced unjustified extra scrutiny from officials, as I had experienced myself going to Tengchong. People acting nervous when they saw my foreign face was also something I experienced here and there.
Still, all this mattered little in the big scheme of things. Compared to life in most of the world, China seemed like a Covid-free oasis of normality. My relatives back home were going from lockdown to lockdown, while I was completely unworried about catching Covid and free to travel around a continent-sized country.
2021 - The first cracks appear
Just before the Spring Festival of 2021, there was an uptick of Covid cases in Beijing and various other cities. We are still talking about very small numbers by the rest of the world's standards, but it rattled the authorities. The government decided to make a serious effort to discourage people from travelling to other parts of China for the holidays. This was effective enough that I, and most of my friends, decided to stay in Beijing.
The Spring Festival is normally the one time of year when Beijing's streets are deserted, as people from other provinces leave to go home, and Beijingers go on holiday. But on this occasion everything was packed, with restaurants and cafes doing a roaring business. I celebrated the Lunar New Year with a staycation in a five-star hotel in Central Beijing with a group of friends. The pool was closed "because of Covid", but the hotel was packed with others who'd had the same idea.
After the holidays, things went back to normal for most of the year. In Spring the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccinations for Covid became available for the general public. In spite of much speculation that the vaccines might become mandatory, they never really did. All you needed to get into public places and travel was a green code on your app, which was not dependent on whether you were vaccinated, but whether you were considered at risk of being infected.
I decided to hold off on getting inoculated. After all, getting Covid in China seemed almost impossible, and I wanted to wait and see if the Western vaccines, which appeared to be more effective, might be allowed in China (they never were). The management of my office building in Beijing asked me a couple of times if I was vaccinated, but they never really pushed me on the matter, and neither did anyone else.
That summer the Delta variant made its appearance and there was another wave of cases across China, with the consequent tightening up of measures. Travelling around the country became harder for a while, but ordinary life was not affected for the most part, and the outbreaks were reigned in again.
Towards the end of 2021 the system was starting to show some strain, with more and more cases slipping through the net and requiring the lockdown of people, neighbourhoods, and sometimes entire cities. Most people could still live normally most of the time, but more and more lives were being disrupted.
I had my first experience of getting quarantined for going to the wrong place in November 2021, when I set foot for five minutes in the lobby of a Beijing hotel where someone who tested positive had been a couple of days earlier. It was only through sheer luck, and the benevolence of a neighbourhood official, that I was able to do the resultant 11 days of quarantine at home, and not in a quarantine centre, where the food and conditions might have been much worse.
A sensor was placed on my door, so that the neighbourhood officials would be alerted every time it was opened, and my health code was turned yellow, so that even if I managed to slip outside nowhere would let me in. Some dabai came to my house and tested me on two separate days. After the BBC correspondent in Beijing retweeted my tweet about what had happened, I was called by Financial Times and Der Spiegel journalists writing stories about China’s lockdowns.
Over Christmas and New Year's I travelled to Hainan, which had become the prime travel destination for Chinese looking for some winter sun, since leaving the country was now off limits. In Hainan it still felt like there was no pandemic at all: no scanning of QR codes, no masks and no issues travelling from city to city. In many parts of China, Covid still felt very far away, and the Zero Covid policy remained broadly popular. There was certainly increased grumbling, however, from the urban middle classes.
Among other things, China had been locked off from the world for two years at this point, and travelling into the country was only getting harder. Flights were insanely expensive, and most cities were now requiring 21 days of centralised quarantine for arrivals from overseas. Stories were being told of people ending up in newly built quarantine centres with horrible food and no wifi. A blood test was required before flying to China, and anyone who had recently been infected with Covid might be unable to fly back for months. Many foreigners in China and Chinese living abroad had been cut off from their families for two years due to these measures.
2022 - A grim theatre of the absurd
The Omicron variant made its first appearance in Tianjin in January, but a strict lockdown was able to get rid of it. I remember reading social media posts by people stuck in their flats in Tianjin, while I sat carefree in a beachside bar in Hainan. At this point I made the wise decision to get China's Covid vaccine. The system held over the Spring Festival 2022 and the subsequent Winter Olympics, which saw foreign athletes kept in a bubble so they wouldn't infect anyone.
For the second year in a row, however, inhabitants of Beijing were strongly discouraged from going back home for the Spring Festival, with threats of quarantine for anyone who returned from another province. Schools had also been strongly discouraging parents from leaving the capital. The grumbling and discontent increased, but it was still subdued.
It was in March that things really started to unravel. The Omicron variant popped up again in Shanghai and other cities, requiring new, strict lockdowns all over the country. The events in Shanghai were particularly eye-catching, not just because of the city's importance, but because of the severity and length of its lockdown and the difficulty many residents had in securing enough to eat. The stories of small children getting quarantined separately from their parents, and of pets getting killed, caused consternation and anger all over the country.
For the rest of 2022 life in China came to resemble some sort of strange dystopian videogame, where you try to go about your daily life while gangs of goons dressed in white look for you to drag you into quarantine. There are those who will try and minimise it, but for a lot of people in China this was a traumatising time, even a tragic one in a few cases.
All this happened around the same time most of the world decided it was time to stop worrying about Covid and go back to normal. The other Zero Covid holdouts, like Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan, all opened up their borders around this time. In Western countries masks and social distancing were almost completely abandoned. This made the situation in China all the more surreal, as if it were located on a different planet from the rest of the world.
Beijing had a Covid outbreak in late April, with dozens of cases a day. After seeing what had happened in Shanghai people panicked, convinced that they would also be stuck in their houses for weeks or months with limited ability to buy food. Supermarket shelves were cleaned out as everyone stocked up on non-perishable food and drinking water (including me). Some expats panicked and got on the first flight out. Acquaintances who'd left China urged me to do the same.
In the end Beijing managed to avoid a full lockdown and buying food was never a problem, but the whole city worked from home for a month and restaurants were only allowed to do deliveries. This is also when mass testing became a thing. Testing booths popped up on every corner, and you had to get a test every two or three days if you wanted to keep your code green.
I was able to leave my flat and go out for walks, but parks were closed and there was little to do. At night Beijing's remaining foreigners and some rebellious young Chinese would gather by the banks of the Liangma River and party away, although the police would regularly break it up. Some areas of the city were locked down, and I knew people who were literally unable to leave their flats or compounds for weeks. If you left the city to go somewhere else in China you didn't know when you would be able to go back, and you risked getting stuck in a lockdown somewhere else.
By this point, it was clear that many Chinese were quite fed up with these policies. Well aware that Covid was no longer seen as deadly threat in the rest of the world, they were wondering when they would be able to live normal lives again. Few of my Chinese friends and acquaintances were still defending the government response. The elderly and those who lived in small towns and the countryside, less affected by lockdowns, were more likely to continue supporting Zero Covid.
After May, life in Beijing never really returned to normal. In June restaurants and offices opened up again, but there was always a chance that passing next to the same place as someone with Covid would trigger the system, leading to you getting a "pop-up window" (the new red code) on your health app. This would probably mean having to do 7 days of home quarantine (quarantine had at least been reduced from 14 to 7 days, in consideration of Omicron's shorter incubation period). Getting tested every two or three days continued to be routine in Beijing and all major cities in China. Fortunately in Beijing the queues were short.
Around this time my building was locked down for four days, because one of the residents had been flagged as a "close contact" of a positive case. The close contact was dragged into quarantine, and everyone else had to stay indoors and submit to two rounds of testing. I found out that my building was being locked down from the WeChat group that the neighbourhood officials had set up to inform the residents of news like this. I was at my office, and decided not to go home. Instead I sought refuge in the flat of a friend who was out of town, and stayed there until my building opened up again. I had broken no law by not going home, but I still felt like a fugitive.
A few days later I went back to Europe for a holiday, for the first time since 2020. Travelling to and from China had become slightly easier and less crazy expensive, and I needed a break. I spent my last night in China in a hotel near the airport. I didn't want to stay home in case they locked down my building again and I was unable to leave. I kept my phone off during taxi rides, so that I wouldn’t get flagged for passing next to a place with Covid cases. This sort of calculation was part and parcel of life in China in 2022.
When I got to the airport, things felt even weirder. The international departures terminal of Beijing's Capital Airport, always packed before 2020, was completely empty, and all the shops and cafes were shut. Even the vending machines were broken. There were a total of five "overseas" departures that whole day, three of which were going to Hong Kong and Macau. On the Air China flight to Paris we were not given hot drinks or earphones to listen to the in-flight movies, "because of Covid". When I landed in Paris and found myself in a bustling airport where nobody wore a mask, I felt like I'd landed in a parallel dimension.
I spent the summer in Europe, where the pandemic seemed to be a thing of the past. I wore a mask on planes and in subways, but I was one of the very few to do so. Meanwhile in China things continued in the same vein. Many Chinese decided to holiday in Hainan or Tibet as if everything was normal, only to get stuck in lockdown in their hotels for weeks after outbreaks of Covid hit those provinces.
It was clear that China was not going to be able to go back to the state it achieved in 2020-2021, with a relatively Covid-free normality in exchange for closed borders. Omicron was just too contagious. The situation was unsustainable and frustration was growing, but it was by no means clear that the government would change course.
I went back to China in September, in what turned out to be an ordeal more expensive and frustrating than it had been in 2020. Britain had no direct flights to China at all, and so I flew back from Berlin. As a British citizen, however, I was required to first get two PCR tests within 48 hours of flying out of Britain, apply for a "green code" from the Chinese embassy in the UK, then fly to Germany, do another two tests in Berlin over 48 hours, get a green code from the embassy there and finally fly to China.
My flight was supposed to go to Beijing, but in reality it was redirected to Dalian, since no flights from abroad were even allowed to reach the capital. I was quarantined for 10 days in Dalian, alongside a planeload of Chinese returning home and a few Germans working for car companies. The experience was far less pleasant than it was in 2020, mainly because we were not allowed to get deliveries from the outside (the whole city was in lockdown anyway). The food we were given was uninspiring and unappetising Chinese hotel food, and we had no choice but to eat it.
On the plus side, they had stopped doing the blood tests and the painful nose swabs, and now only did mild throat swabs. On the other hand I was woken up in the middle of the night to be tested on a couple of occasions, in one of those inexplicable and petty abuses to which the system would sometimes subject you.
There was also the constant worry about whether I would be able to go back to Beijing. Dalian had a Covid outbreak, which meant Beijing wasn't keen on letting people in from there. I bought two plane tickets that were cancelled, before a third ticket finally worked. If I had been unable to go to Beijing, I would have had to remain in the quarantine hotel, or fly to a different city and risk getting quarantined in another hotel for a further 7 days.
In the end I managed to fly back. In one of the most ridiculous pieces of Covid theatre, my suitcase (which had already been sprayed with disinfectant) was put inside a plastic bag before it was checked in, so any viruses on it wouldn't infect the other suitcases! After getting home I enjoyed one day of freedom, and then discovered I had to do another six days of home quarantine because I had come from Dalian. Never mind that I never left my quarantine hotel and was taken to the airport and put on the plane in a "closed loop" by staff in hazmat suits, meaning that I had no contact with outsiders. On the plane I had sat next to people from Dalian, so I had to be quarantined again.
There was no sensor on the door this time, but the pop-up on my health app would have made it impossible for me to go anywhere or get back into the neighbourhood, so I wisely stayed home. Meanwhile various officials from the police and other governments departments started calling me in succession to check why I was in Beijing and whether I was in quarantine, with no coordination between them.
Once my quarantine was over, I went back to my everyday life. Everyone was fed up with Zero Covid, it was clear, but there seemed to be no easy way out. Everyone believed that Covid suddenly spreading unchecked would have disastrous consequences for the country's hospitals, and many elderly would die.
People lived with the constant anxiety of getting a phone call, or an SMS, notifying them that they had to be quarantined. In Beijing it was usually home quarantine (in most of China you were likely to get sent to a grim quarantine facility), but still, the prospect of having to live with this risk indefinitely was not an appealing one.
Over October Beijing enjoyed something approaching normal life, but travel to other provinces remained strongly discouraged and full of uncertainties. The 20th Congress of the CPC came and went, and Xi Jinping was reconfirmed for a third term. Many of my Chinese friends expected China to loosen up its Covid measures after the congress, when Xi was firmly in power and could start to study a way out of this mess. I was less optimistic. After all, the guy kept repeating that the current approach was the best one for China.
November 2022 - the dam bursts
In early November, the Chinese government published 20 new measures on Covid prevention. The measures were clearly an attempt to loosen up a bit, make it easier for people to live and work like normal, but at the same time continue to contain Covid. The problems with the current approach were acknowledged, but they were blamed entirely on local authorities engaging in bureaucratic formalism and excessive 一刀切 (one-size-fits-all) measures. Zero Covid was not being abandoned.
I was sceptical that such an approach could work. After all, Covid could either be contained, or it could be left to explode. It was hard to see how a middle ground could be reached. Throughout November, the authorities in Beijing seemed to be tentatively searching for a new way of doing things. Covid cases slowly rose, but the city wasn't locked down even when daily cases reached triple figures. Residential buildings were still being closed down with no warning, but the lockdowns were becoming more targeted and shorter.
I was called a couple of times because I had been flagged for going somewhere with a Covid risk (you had to scan the QR code when you entered public places, so you left a trace). This time however I was only asked to get tested daily for three days, and not locked up at home (to my great relief). The general impression was that we were moving towards a more liberal Zero Covid regime, as it were.
On one occasion my building was locked down in the middle of the night, because one of the residents was in a batch of ten PCR tests that returned a positive result (the mass tests were checked in batches of ten, to save money). The resident had to be tested individually, and we had to wait for the result to come back negative before we were free to leave our homes. Luckily that happened by around 10 am, meaning that my day wasn't affected at all. By this point I was both completely used to this sort of thing, and also completely fed up with it.
Then in mid-November, Beijing's authorities lost their nerve. Covid cases were still rising, and they decided to ask non-essential workers to work from home, close down public places and order restaurants to only do deliveries. We were back in "soft lockdown", meaning that we could leave our houses but had nowhere to go. This time it wasn't summer and the weather was cold, making it all the more depressing.
With bars and restaurants shut, foreigners continued to socialise and party at each other's homes, but there was always a small risk of the block of flats being locked down in the middle of a party, leaving everyone trapped there for what could be days. Stranger things have happened in Zero Covid China.
Meanwhile there was contradictory news from the rest of the country. The city of Shijiazhuang had experimented with opening up completely, but then as Covid had spread like wildfire they had changed their minds. The message coming from the central government was still that Covid had to be contained, and local leaders didn't feel they had the political cover to just do away with all the unpopular health measures.
Tension was building up all over China. Many cities seemed to be in endless lockdown. Images of the World Cup in Qatar, with fans from all over the globe packing the stadiums without a mask, QR code or quarantine squad in sight, drove home to many Chinese that there was a world out there where the Covid pandemic was a thing of the past.
At the end of November, things finally came to a head. Either because the lockdowns were getting in the way of their livelihood, or just because they were aghast at the thought of continuing to live like this forever, ordinary people all over China started physically breaking through quarantine barriers, clashing with the dabai and demanding to be able to leave their homes and go back to work.
Even more worryingly for those in power, people started spontaneously organising vigils for the victims of the tragic fire in Urumqi, which quickly turned into denunciations of the Zero Covid policy and the wider political system. Students around the country, who had been literally confined to their campuses for months, also held vigils and protested, while workers at the huge Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, which makes a fair number of the world's iPhones, clashed with the police. In many ways it felt like the run-up to the protests in 1989, which also brought students, white and blue-collar workers together throughout the country in what was basically a national insurrection.
The peak of the protests was reached over the weekend of 26-27 November. I spent the weekend stuck in my flat, in lockdown. My building had once again been closed down, because one of the residents was part of a batch of ten PCR tests that returned a positive case. There was police tape sealing the building's entrance, with a guard sitting behind it. We were not allowed to leave.
Just like many others in China, I witnessed the weekend's extraordinary events on WeChat. All over my WeChat Moments, and in all the WeChat groups I am part of, people started sharing videos of the unrest accompanied by their own angry rants. Most of the videos were of groups of neighbours bursting out of locked down buildings, surrounding officials and demanding that they be allowed to leave their homes, or refusing to be taken away into quarantine. But videos of the openly political protests in the centres of Shanghai and Beijing were also being shared. The censors were clearly completely overwhelmed.
The WeChat group for my building's residents, set up by the community officials to communicate Covid-related information to us, was also aflame with anger. The residents, mostly Beijingers of ordinary means (I was the only foreigner) made it clear they were fed up to the teeth with being forced indoors. People shared subversive videos; they demanded to know who had decided to lock us in our own homes, and with what authority. No one defended the decision, or claimed that we should all join hands to fight the pandemic, as they had done on previous occasions.
I knew that something had to give, and it did. I spent the following weekend at home, ill with a virus that I now think may well have been Covid. When I left my flat after three days, I found myself in a different China. It was clear quarantines and QR codes were on the way out. On December 7, the National Health Commission announced that people with mild cases of Covid could quarantine at home, and declared that the virus no longer needed to be managed like a dangerous disease. It was over.
I wasn't in China for COVID, but I was there for SARS which was a massive cluster-%^&* that the whole world got lucky at because it basically disappeared, and afterwards not enough of us, especially outside the Asia-Pacific area, learned the lessons of. SARS seemed like a big water-shed for a lot of people when I lived in China in terms of trust for the government, but the effect faded relatively quickly.
After COVID, it doesn't seem to be going back to "normal" at all from what little I can see. Expats who left mostly haven't returned. Indeed the opportunity seems to have been take to clear them out. On top of that, here in the UK at least, there has been a visible influx of Hong Kongers.
Obviously there are some other things that have happened whose impact contributes to this. The first is the crackdown in Hong Kong which has really impacted how China is seen as a whole in terms of risk in a place that is still a big centre for foreign business in China. The second is Russia invading Ukraine which has again changed people's appreciation of the risk of doing business in dictatorships, particularly the risk of war between the US (and the wider "west") and China. The perception is of a country that will ram home a desired policy with only minimal attention paid to any blow-back from that. Of course there's some longer-term changes that also formed a back-drop to this (primarily the tightening grip on power of Xi, the mass imprisonment of Uighurs).
Of course I was in one of the "bad" countries as far as COVID 19 policy is concerned - though in the end it turned out not to have been so bad. Poor UK policy in 2020 (delaying lockdown until it was too late, hesitancy about locking down later in the hear, sending COVID carriers back to care homes) was largely balanced out by better policy in 2021-2 (vaccine roll-out and opening-up). The impact of all this has not been good - education particularly has suffered particularly. Still, people seem to have largely forgotten the pandemic, so that it is a surprise when it is mentioned and you realise that it wasn't so long ago yet seems like a different life.
I admire your resilience Gabriel. I wasn’t aware that you were caught up in so many rounds of lockdowns and grotesque situations.
What I’d appreciate is your analysis of the aftermath. I visited China this year after three years of absence, and I sensed some form of collective post traumatic stress syndrome. The atmosphere was tepid and still filled with anxiety and exhaustion.
I hope things will get better soon for the Chinese. They’ve sacrificed so much.