For many Chinese who saw Shanghai as a magical place to pursue their dreams, the city’s two-month-long Covid-19 lockdown has been a wake-up call.
It wasn’t just the isolation and living under the threat of being hauled to a quarantine center. Many describe how a forced switch to survival mode created a deep sense of insecurity. Now, some are outlining drastically altered life plans.
Earlier this year, Sandra Shen, a 27-year-old who teaches piano in her apartment, was discussing with her husband, also from Shanghai, whether they would soon have children. She was hesitating. Now, she has decided: It’s a firm no.
It wasn’t any one thing, but a combination of factors that led to her decision. First came authorities’ decision to lock down the whole city—after officials signaled no such move would be necessary. Then came the difficulty in securing online grocery delivery and the forced entry by officials into apartments whose residents had been taken to quarantine centers. Perhaps the last straw for Ms. Shen, who has two dogs, was video footage of a Corgi being beaten to death by a community worker after the owner was taken to quarantine.
“It’s enough that our generation is being bullied," she said. Her new plan is to travel and retire early, maybe as young as 40.
Versions of Shanghai’s lockdown are playing out across the country, adding to anxiety among many younger Chinese over limited upward mobility. Many middle-class citizens who have believed if they work hard and obey the rules they can expect a brighter future now are coming to the realization that the “China Dream" laid out by President Xi Jinping might not include them,
People around the world have made big life changes during the pandemic, such as moving away from big cities or resigning from jobs that felt too stressful. In China, the responses have been influenced by authorities’ zero-tolerance approach to even small outbreaks, which has meant rolling lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines in centralized facilities. For some, that has led to a form of awakening to how easily their lives can be upended to fit government dictates, dissipating their desire to start families, buy apartments or start businesses.
There was already a catchphrase to describe young people’s disenchantment: “lying flat"—a rejection of long working hours and traditional expectations of marriage and children within certain age milestones. A new expression for deeper despair is now gaining ground: “let it rot."
The pessimism and frustration with draconian Covid measures among especially younger Chinese is crystallized in a now-censored video clip showing a conversation between a young man in Shanghai and authorities who were trying to take him to a quarantine center. Responding to pandemic-control workers’ warning that if he didn’t obey, the consequence could carry over into the next three generations of his family, the man said matter-of-factly: “We are the last generation."
A 36-year-old theater manager in Shanghai who has been single for years says she is now completely scrapping any thoughts about getting married.
The woman, who agreed to be identified only by her last name, Yuan, moved to Shanghai in late 2020 from Beijing, where the performance company she worked for was battered by strict Covid controls. She was attracted by Shanghai’s success in keeping cases low while avoiding major disruptions to businesses and people’s lives, and hoped to eventually start her own theater company.
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In March, when cases of the Omicron variant of the virus started popping up, she assumed Shanghai authorities would have the outbreak under control within a week or two.
The severity of the lockdown was a shock, Ms. Yuan said. In early April, she was sending food every day to neighbors who had failed to stock up. After seeing even the most affluent residents in her high-end apartment compound begging for food, she said she realized that in today’s China, even basic essentials can’t be guaranteed.
She now hopes to save a large sum of money to either put in a low-risk investment product or open a grocery store in her hometown in Heilongjiang province. “I’m rethinking my career and family plans. I’m very cautious, very pessimistic," she said.
Even before the pandemic, Chinese authorities were worried about declining births and a drop in marriage rates. The Communist Party has over the past years put emphasis on “family values." Mr. Xi has called families the cells of society that underpin the prosperity of the nation.
Shanghai already has one of the lowest birthrates in the country, with the total number of children a woman in the city has over her lifetime at 0.7 in 2021. There were more deaths than births in Shanghai last year.
Covid-related confinement has been linked to a rise in depression and mental-health issues around the world. In early 2020, when Covid-19 first erupted in Wuhan in central China, months of isolation and anxiety took a toll on the mental health of residents, leading to an increase in suicides.
This spring, around the time when Shanghai’s 25 million residents started grappling with Covid restrictions, including lockdown measures, the number of searches on Chinese search engine Baidu Inc. for “psychological counseling" saw a spike.
A Beijing-based therapist, who volunteered her counseling services during both the 2020 lockdown in Wuhan and the one in Shanghai this year, said she saw a surge of calls for help through free hotlines in both cities as people hunkered down at home. Meanwhile, her paying clients have struggled to keep up with regular sessions. Some of them have lost their jobs and can’t pay for sessions, while others are locked down with their parents or young children and don’t have any privacy, she said.
Amelie Hu, a 44-year-old in-house lawyer at an American company in Shanghai who has been under orders to stay home since March 10, said she has been devouring sweets to cope with anxiety and depression, made worse by reading about other residents who couldn’t get prompt medical care due to the lockdown.
Ms. Hu said after she returned to Shanghai from New York in 2013, she had thought she would live in her hometown for life. Married to an American citizen, she hadn’t considered pursuing U.S. permanent residency until the lockdown. “If the government could lock us in for three months, I don’t know what can happen in the future," she said. While she is critical of American politics, a green card is now on her agenda. “I just need an option," she said.
George Chen, a salesman at a technology company in Beijing, said that for months he hasn’t been able to travel much for work due to Covid-19 restrictions. Failing to meet his sales targets, he has lost his bonuses. Most of his basic monthly salary of about 3,000 yuan, equivalent to about $445, goes to pay rent for an apartment he shares with others. Mr. Chen, in his late 20s and a native of Hebei province, said he now has shelved his plan of trying to buy an apartment and finding a girlfriend.
“Let’s be realistic. Do I look very marketable now?" he said. His short-term plan is to move back in with his parents in Hebei and then figure out what’s next.
Late one night recently, he received an automated phone call from Beijing authorities saying he had been in proximity to someone with a confirmed Covid infection, which means he can’t go to public places until the health code on his phone turns green. That could involve two PCR tests and several days’ wait.
Although he knew it was an automated message, he said, he couldn’t help yelling at his phone.
Liyan Qi
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