Virus lockdown blankets China
Xi’s ‘people’s war’ affects at least 760M people, analysis finds
SHANGHAI — China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.
The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.
The nation is battling the outbreak of coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19, with a grassroots mobilization reminiscent of former Communist Chairman Mao Zedong’s mass crusades, not seen in China in decades — essentially entrusting front-line epidemic prevention to a supercharged version of a neighborhood watch.
Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from entering cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the countryside, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other improvised barriers.
Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their movements, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.
Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which Beijing sealed off last month.
Throughout China, neighborhoods and localities have issued their own rules about residents’ comings and goings, which means the total number of affected people may be even higher. Policies vary widely, leaving some places in a virtual freeze and others with few strictures.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for an all-out “people’s war” to tame the outbreak even as authorities acknowledged for the first time Saturday that Xi was aware of the epidemic nearly two weeks before he first spoke publicly about it — and while officials at its epicenter in the city of Wuhan were still playing down its dangers.
In a newly released internal speech that Xi delivered on Feb. 3, when the epidemic had already spiraled into a national crisis, the Chinese president said he had “issued demands about the efforts to prevent and control” the coronavirus on Jan. 7.
But the restrictions have prevented workers from returning to factories and businesses, straining China’s giant economy. And with local officials exercising such direct authority over people’s movements, it is no surprise that some have taken enforcement to extremes.
Li Jing, 40, an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou, was almost barred from taking her husband to a hospital recently after he choked on a fish bone during dinner. The reason? Her neighborhood allows only one person per family to leave the house, every other day.
China has raised its infection total to 66,492 and death toll to 1,523.
Meanwhile, an 80-yearold Chinese tourist died in France of the coronavirus, the French health minister said Saturday, becoming the outbreak’s first fatality in Europe and outside Asia.
China’s prevention efforts are being led by its myriad neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and local authorities. Supporting them is the government’s “grid management” system, which divides the country into tiny sections and assigns people to watch over each, ensuring a tight grip over a large population.
Zhejiang province, on C h i n a ’s southeastern seaboard, has a population of nearly 60 million and has enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei province, whose capital is Wuhan, has deployed 170,000. The southern province of Guangdong has called upon 177,000, landlocked Sichuan has 308,000, and the megacity of Chongqing has 118,000.
Authorities are also combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus. China’s state-run cellular providers allow subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited.
With large numbers of new infections being reported every day, the government has clear reasons for minimizing human contact and domestic travel. But experts said that in epidemics, overbearing measures can backfire, scaring infected people into hiding and making the outbreak harder to control.
“Public health relies on public trust,” said Alexandra Phelan, a specialist in global health law at Georgetown University. “These community-level quarantines and the arbitrary nature in which they’re being imposed and tied up with the police and other officials is essentially making them into punitive actions — a coercive action rather than a public health action.”