Student life crawls along in zero-covid China
Young people display their frustration with pandemic restrictions by joining new craze of walking on all fours
AFTER three years of restrictive Covid-19 lockdowns and online learning, students in China will be forgiven for feeling as though they are going in circles.
To signal their frustration with Xi
Jinping’s zero-covid policy, they are getting down on their hands and knees and doing just that. In a country where criticising the government is laden with danger, young people are engaging in a gentler form of demonstration that has been dubbed “collective crawling”.
Footage of students forming a circle and crawling around has flooded social media. It is a way for them to express ennui, boredom and fatigue with unending pandemic restrictions. “The crawling movement started because many students are greatly impacted by the flare-ups of Covid,” Harrison Peng, a second-year university student in Chongqing, told The Telegraph. “We are not allowed to go outside, and with the pressure of studying, many students can’t find a better way to relieve the stress.” Lin Shihou, another student at Chongqing University, described it as a “collective ritual for young people to release the feelings of being repressed”.
In a bizarre parallel, a video of hundreds of sheep walking in a circle for 12 days in Mongolia went viral last week. The flock was thought to be suffering from listeriosis rather than lockdown fatigue. Covid restrictions have ravaged the Chinese economy and the job prospects of young people. Yesterday Beijing health authorities announced a mandatory three-day isolation for people entering the city and urged residents to work from home and reduce social contact, after one of the worst outbreaks of infection since the start of the pandemic.
Earlier this year, university students started making pets out of cardboard and walking them around campus as a statement on lockdowns.
Last month, Chinese state television began promoting crawling as a fitness fad, broadcasting images of elderly men in the eastern Jiangsu province doing a “crocodile crawl”. But while crawling may be considered exercise, the students aren’t involved for the health benefits.
Its spread to campuses can be traced to an anonymous online post this month by a student at Communication University of China in Beijing, who said that he wanted to walk on all fours across campus. “With the arbitrary lockdowns of universities … students would go insane if they didn’t find something to relieve the stress,” wrote one commenter on Weibo, the social media site.