Caught in a zero-COVID trap | Extreme measures, state power, and the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens

China’s strategy of lockdown and mass testing that made sense in a world without vaccines is now past its sell-by date. Ananth Krishnan reports on what the extreme measures and the expansion of state power have meant for the daily lives of residents

In pre-pandemic times, visitors to Shenzhen would often feel as if they were travelling in time to the future. China’s technology hub is famed for being at the forefront of adopting new technologies that still remain on blueprints in the rest of the world, from futuristic buildings with sprawling indoor gardens that appear right out of a sci-fi movie, to the ubiquitous use of facial recognition technology for everything from riding subways to entering supermarkets.

Today, arriving in Shenzhen still feels like time travel — except now it is to the past. More precisely, it is to two years ago at the height of the pandemic, when lockdowns were part of the daily vocabulary globally and COVID-19 was seen as a deadly and life-threatening disease in a world without vaccines.

On an afternoon this June, a group of travellers arrived in Shenzhen in the Chinese mainland from Hong Kong. The journey, once a smooth, 20-minute train ride, now involves a gruelling 12-hour exercise at the border control point. This includes two deeply invasive nasal swabs that, for some travellers, even drew blood. The group was greeted by an army of Shenzhen health personnel dressed in full-white PPEs.

The ‘Big Whites’ or ‘Da Bai’, as the PPE-clad healthcare enforcers are known in China, have in the past two years become the faces of the country’s stringent COVID-19 regulations. China is the only country that still follows a heavy-handed ‘dynamic zero-COVID’ policy, which calls for mass testing, lockdowns and quarantining of close contacts to eliminate outbreaks in the shortest possible time.

“Keep on your masks!” a Big White yelled at one arrival whose mask had slipped slightly below her nose. The group cleared immigration after downloading and scanning numerous Chinese ‘health code’ apps that are an indispensable internal travel passport in the country today. They were then sprayed with disinfectant, along with their luggage, before being whisked away on buses, with full police escort, to be confined in a room for a mandatory 22-day quarantine. And these were all vaccinated travellers who had also been tested no less than twice in just a few hours.

While the rest of the world has sought to move on to some form of post-pandemic normalcy, China remains firmly in the grip of a harsh zero-COVID policy. China is where the pandemic began, and it appears increasingly likely that this is where the last chapter of the pandemic will end.

On September 14, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 in the second week of September was the lowest since March 2020. “We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” he said. “We’re not there yet, but the end is in sight.”