Thousands flee Shanghai after ‘unbearable’ lockdown restrictions

Take a vitamin C pill, spray disinfectant on the elevator ceiling, go downstairs to get a PCR test, rush back to the apartment, shove your clothes in the washing machine, shower and repeat — all while trying to suppress the fear that at any moment, authorities might take you away to a Covid quarantine centre and kill your cat.

That’s what daily life was reduced to for 60 days for Nicole Tsai, a 35-year-old marketing manager in Shanghai who went through the city’s gruelling two-month Covid lockdown this year.

It quickly became “unbearable”. After years of witnessing the gradual loss of political freedoms in China and with no hope of things improving, the lockdown was the final straw. Particularly when she started hearing reports that people’s pets were being culled as an infection prevention measure.

“I became very sure that I didn’t want to live like that anymore,” she said. “I had to run.”

Tsai is among a growing exodus of middle-class Chinese and foreign people who are leaving Shanghai — and sometimes the country — after the city’s draconian lockdown in April and May. For two months, most residents in the city of 25 million people were banned from leaving their apartments — including to walk pets or buy groceries — except for almost-daily PCR tests.

Thousands were placed in makeshift quarantine centres. There were widespread reports of people going hungry.

The strict measures quarantining vast swathes of people were intended to keep the omicron variant at bay and protect the country’s economic centre and global trade hub.

But with cases still popping up, threats of fresh restrictions and no end in sight to President Xi Jinping’s zero-covid policy, China’s wealthiest and most cosmopolitan metropolis is

being permanently damaged as wealthier residents pack their bags for good.

“It’s quite a paradox because these people who have benefited from China’s economic development, they are migrating not for higher income,” says Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. “No one is leaving for economic benefit but rather out of concern for life itself.”

At least 10,000 high-net-worth individuals will leave mainland China and 3000 will depart Hong Kong this year amid Covid restrictions and political uncertainties, taking a combined wealth of £53 billion ($96b) with them, according to the Henley & Partners investment consultancy.

Among them are Sasha and Colin, an American couple who moved there to set up a business. They asked to use pseudonyms because they fear reprisal from authorities. They said they fell in love with the city — but that has changed now.

“There is a lot of collective anxiety, and the implications for the mental health of the population [are large],” Sasha says. “The government doesn’t realise how much damage they have done.” — Telegraph Group Ltd