an ethnography of WeChat during the lockdown
April 23, 2022 9:13 PM Subscribe
The 2022 Omicron outbreak in Shenzhen: consensus about staying in place and anxieties about mobility. A plumber was called to fix a toilet. It was a standard job, requiring about 45 minutes to clear and connect pipes. However, in the time required to analyse and resolve the problem, the building was locked down and the plumber had to live with the customer’s family for 14 days.
An explanation of WeChat's central role in the pandemic:posted by spamandkimchi at 9:19 PM on April 23, 2022
Wow, it's been a long time, but I used to know the author. She's been writing about Shenzhen for at least 30 years now, I guess. Thanks for posting this!
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:54 PM on April 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:54 PM on April 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
That's one long and dense article.
I've been loosely following the omicron outbreak in China, and it's a head spinning mass of confusion, authoritarianism, discord, pettiness, distrust, ineptitude, all blamed and/or justified on good intentions and ass covering. There are no official trustworthy sources of information, corruption continues apace, and it's all anyone could do to get through it all. Almost all the information we get here is bullshitty at best, originating from clandestine CCP approved sources masquerading as average citizens, of very axe grindy expats that run the gamut from sane to wacko.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:24 PM on April 23, 2022 [5 favorites]
I've been loosely following the omicron outbreak in China, and it's a head spinning mass of confusion, authoritarianism, discord, pettiness, distrust, ineptitude, all blamed and/or justified on good intentions and ass covering. There are no official trustworthy sources of information, corruption continues apace, and it's all anyone could do to get through it all. Almost all the information we get here is bullshitty at best, originating from clandestine CCP approved sources masquerading as average citizens, of very axe grindy expats that run the gamut from sane to wacko.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:24 PM on April 23, 2022 [5 favorites]
At $250 per hour rates, the family that hired the plumber was bankrupted for two generations.
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:25 AM on April 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:25 AM on April 24, 2022 [5 favorites]
Most of China has been doing well with high intensity fast lockdowns, such as Shenzhen's approach. Shanghai has been incredibly stupid, however, with their elitist mindset and daft administration mistakes, compounded by bad building ventilation/plumbing standards that cause near instantaneous spread within a building if someone gets it. Fecal droplets spread very fast when vents don't work and pipes don't have traps.
Of course most westerners and expats like to talk about how horrible things are when you have to give up personal autonomy for a couple weeks in order to save a bunch of lives. It gets clicks with self-serving morons who think their own best interests are the most important. Easy to points and laugh when your own country has served up a million dead and who knows how many millions permanently disabled.
But, sure, china LOL. Go ahead.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:27 AM on April 24, 2022 [6 favorites]
Of course most westerners and expats like to talk about how horrible things are when you have to give up personal autonomy for a couple weeks in order to save a bunch of lives. It gets clicks with self-serving morons who think their own best interests are the most important. Easy to points and laugh when your own country has served up a million dead and who knows how many millions permanently disabled.
But, sure, china LOL. Go ahead.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:27 AM on April 24, 2022 [6 favorites]
Most of China has been doing well with high intensity fast lockdowns
for the simple reason that if you can reduce person-to-person transmission rates enough to cut an outbreak's reproduction number to well below 1 while the absolute number of infections is still very low, it doesn't then take very long for that outbreak to burn out completely.
Get onto it fast enough - basically as soon as any community transmission is detected - and a short lockdown is all that's required, whose social and economic cost will be no-brainer lower than that of a raging uncontrolled outbreak.
Dither and blither and wait until after confirmed infection numbers have already risen into the hundreds and your delay is doing nothing but causing completely unnecessary suffering, both from the many-times-multiplied time it will take for your too-late lockdown to suppress the outbreak and from the increased community disease load as it does so (or, if your community is also afflicted by mask=muzzle libertarian fuckwits with no grasp of exponential function behaviour or epidemiology or social justice or the meaning of personal responsibility or 安分守己 or basically how anything actually works, fails to).
The ongoing refusal of the Australian political class to grasp this blindingly obvious principle has shat me to tears for the entire duration of this pandemic. And although I am no fan of the CCP nor of authoritarian regimes in general, and although I have been dismayed by the reported indiscriminate brutality of many of its lockdown enforcement methods and would vastly prefer to see those applied only against members of the aforementioned libertarian fuckwit brigade, I think its underlying zero-COVID policy stance is absolutely correct.
What an uncontrolled respiratory epidemic looks like in a country of 1.4 billion ageing people that currently supplies the world with most of its manufactured goods is something I hope never to find out.
posted by flabdablet at 8:23 AM on April 24, 2022 [7 favorites]
for the simple reason that if you can reduce person-to-person transmission rates enough to cut an outbreak's reproduction number to well below 1 while the absolute number of infections is still very low, it doesn't then take very long for that outbreak to burn out completely.
Get onto it fast enough - basically as soon as any community transmission is detected - and a short lockdown is all that's required, whose social and economic cost will be no-brainer lower than that of a raging uncontrolled outbreak.
Dither and blither and wait until after confirmed infection numbers have already risen into the hundreds and your delay is doing nothing but causing completely unnecessary suffering, both from the many-times-multiplied time it will take for your too-late lockdown to suppress the outbreak and from the increased community disease load as it does so (or, if your community is also afflicted by mask=muzzle libertarian fuckwits with no grasp of exponential function behaviour or epidemiology or social justice or the meaning of personal responsibility or 安分守己 or basically how anything actually works, fails to).
The ongoing refusal of the Australian political class to grasp this blindingly obvious principle has shat me to tears for the entire duration of this pandemic. And although I am no fan of the CCP nor of authoritarian regimes in general, and although I have been dismayed by the reported indiscriminate brutality of many of its lockdown enforcement methods and would vastly prefer to see those applied only against members of the aforementioned libertarian fuckwit brigade, I think its underlying zero-COVID policy stance is absolutely correct.
What an uncontrolled respiratory epidemic looks like in a country of 1.4 billion ageing people that currently supplies the world with most of its manufactured goods is something I hope never to find out.
posted by flabdablet at 8:23 AM on April 24, 2022 [7 favorites]
based on what I have read about the SARS outbreak in the oughts, things could have gone REALLY badly. the fact that China clamped down very quickly, if draconianly, stopped things from blowing up. its a much more virulent disease than COVID-19. if it had managed to go full pandemic the death toll and other impacts would have been terrifying.
posted by supermedusa at 9:04 AM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by supermedusa at 9:04 AM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
Of course most westerners and expats like to talk about how horrible things are when you have to give up personal autonomy for a couple weeks in order to save a bunch of lives
It's been over two years sine this pandemic started. I don't think the choices are solely "mountain of dead bodies" or "authoritarian lockdowns, forever".
posted by bradbane at 10:49 AM on April 24, 2022 [6 favorites]
It's been over two years sine this pandemic started. I don't think the choices are solely "mountain of dead bodies" or "authoritarian lockdowns, forever".
posted by bradbane at 10:49 AM on April 24, 2022 [6 favorites]
The social contract as seen on social media (from the article):
A WeChat avatar poignantly named ‘antsmoving’ gave voice to the precarity of urban village life under lockdown in a comment posted on the Shenzhen Health Commission WeChat account:posted by spamandkimchi at 10:58 AM on April 24, 2022
Chaguang Village [in Shuguang Community, Xili Subdistrict, Nanshan] is locked down. I am a 30-year-old man. I have a breakfast shop, and I rely on this shop for my entire income. This evening I am truly breaking down! My family is scattered, and I am the only one responsible. I am a father, a son, and a husband … Since March 1, my breakfast shop hasn’t earned a single penny. All I do is pay rent, buy supplies and pay my workers. I thought it would get better. But I look at my family photographs and tear up. I really have broken down.
This post quickly went viral, receiving more than 10,000 likes. Nanshan District’s response to this post brought the issue to millions of Shenzheners via social and traditional media. According to multiple reports, Nanshan arranged for the Shuguang Community Party Secretary to visit ‘antsmoving’ at his home. The Shuguang representatives brought prepared foods and fruit, and the party secretary sat down with him to explain grid management. The secretary also suggested that antsmoving’s shop could provide breakfasts for community health workers and volunteers, resolving his economic difficulties. In subsequent publications of this encounter, antsmoving is quoted as saying how the government’s ‘warmth’ (温馨) allowed him to overcome his difficulties.
It was the essential delivery worker dilemma that caught my attention (line breaks added):
To provision people in lockdown and control areas, the city relied on delivery companies such as Meituan, Hema, and volunteer groups, while Jingdong, Shunfeng, Yunda, the postal service, and others supplied essential commodities acquired through ‘internet purchases’ (网购).posted by spamandkimchi at 10:59 AM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
However, most of these workers lived in urban villages, which were often classified as lockdown areas, where residents ‘could only enter, but not leave’ (只进不出). This caused significant glitches in the efficient provisioning of essential goods and services.
Delivery boys who wanted to work the next day slept on the street, rather than risk going home to a building or neighbourhood that was or could be locked down at any time.
Most of China has been doing well with high intensity fast lockdowns, such as Shenzhen's approach. Shanghai has been incredibly stupid, however, with their elitist mindset
With all due respect, I have to ask: how many Chinese citizens, who either currently live in China or have extensive networks of families/friends there, do you know? Do you read/speak Chinese, and communicate with Chinese residents on a daily basis?
Jilin city has been in lockdown for 50+ days. Other major cities in Northeast China such as Changchun and Harbin have gone through similar ordeals. So have many other places all over China. A lot of the residents there are not doing okay. Rough translations of a few comments from the linked weibos:
"再说一次中国不是联邦制，只骂上海的，是因为其他地方已经哭死了，上海是那个还能哭出来的."
"Say it again: China is not a federation. To those who only scold Shanghai: this is because other places have already cried to death. Shanghai is the one who can still cry."
"一直看到各种人说为什么广州可以，深圳可以，只有上海不行。那是因为你们根本不知道东北三省也还在封闭，吉林51天，南昌也一个月可，上海所有的问题，买不到药，看不了病，各种问题他们都有，只是目前只有上海的发声还能被看见"
"Keep seeing various people ask why Guangzhou and Shenzheng can do it, only Shanghai cannot. That's because you don't know the three Northeast provinces are still in lockdown, Jilin for 51 days, Nanchang a month. Every problem Shanghai faces, can't buy medicine, can't see a doctor, they have all those problems. But so far only the words from Shanghai are visible."
"东北不是不发声，发声能看到的是少数 [...] 发声了没多少人看能怎能办。超话和实时还被筛被删能怎么办"
"It's not that Northeast doesn't speak up. Only a minority can speak up and be heard. [...] What can you do if you speak up and few people hear? What can you do if you get filtered/deleted from the super-topics and real-time search?"
"上海嚎一句万转，东北嚎一句进局子"
"Cry one line in Shanghai and get ten thousand reblogs, cry one line in the Northeast and get arrested."
Of course most westerners and expats like to talk about how horrible things are when you have to give up personal autonomy for a couple weeks in order to save a bunch of lives.
What I want to talk about (a few examples among hundreds):
* "the delievery guy had a traffic accident, blood all over, it's been an hour since calling 120 (emergency line). The police came, the guy's family came, 120 still haven't come"
* the many, many suicides. Due to mental health issues from lockdown, or unbearable physical pain that can't be alleviated without medical attention
* "Dear leaders, I want to take a shower" - because literally hundreds of thousands of university students are in dorm lockdown. Many of them are forbidden to take showers, and even need to take assigned numbers to use toilets
* the now-deleted witness account of seniors in mobile cabin hospitals. The majority of harrowing first-hand accounts are swiftly removed from social media, but they keep popping up
* "Are you human? Any humanity left?"
* the touching story of the woman who lived in a telephone booth for five days. I am not being sarcastic: the media are literally presenting this as a touching story of the government rescuing private citizens.
* Covid makes fire hazards irrelevant, apparently
* whatever the fuck this is
* Douban suspended comments on 1984 temporarily, in response to the widespread backlash over the removal of the video I posted in my earlier comment
* if you get it, you get it
----------------------------------------------------------------
But, sure, china LOL. Go ahead
I don't even know why I bother with MetaFilter anymore, especially with China-related topics.
Some of us care about China because we are ethnic Chinese, we have meaningful connections to living, breathing human beings in China. It's not about the West, much less mocking China from a Western perspective.
I. Care. About. Them.
posted by fatehunter at 12:34 PM on April 24, 2022 [47 favorites]
With all due respect, I have to ask: how many Chinese citizens, who either currently live in China or have extensive networks of families/friends there, do you know? Do you read/speak Chinese, and communicate with Chinese residents on a daily basis?
Jilin city has been in lockdown for 50+ days. Other major cities in Northeast China such as Changchun and Harbin have gone through similar ordeals. So have many other places all over China. A lot of the residents there are not doing okay. Rough translations of a few comments from the linked weibos:
"再说一次中国不是联邦制，只骂上海的，是因为其他地方已经哭死了，上海是那个还能哭出来的."
"Say it again: China is not a federation. To those who only scold Shanghai: this is because other places have already cried to death. Shanghai is the one who can still cry."
"一直看到各种人说为什么广州可以，深圳可以，只有上海不行。那是因为你们根本不知道东北三省也还在封闭，吉林51天，南昌也一个月可，上海所有的问题，买不到药，看不了病，各种问题他们都有，只是目前只有上海的发声还能被看见"
"Keep seeing various people ask why Guangzhou and Shenzheng can do it, only Shanghai cannot. That's because you don't know the three Northeast provinces are still in lockdown, Jilin for 51 days, Nanchang a month. Every problem Shanghai faces, can't buy medicine, can't see a doctor, they have all those problems. But so far only the words from Shanghai are visible."
"东北不是不发声，发声能看到的是少数 [...] 发声了没多少人看能怎能办。超话和实时还被筛被删能怎么办"
"It's not that Northeast doesn't speak up. Only a minority can speak up and be heard. [...] What can you do if you speak up and few people hear? What can you do if you get filtered/deleted from the super-topics and real-time search?"
"上海嚎一句万转，东北嚎一句进局子"
"Cry one line in Shanghai and get ten thousand reblogs, cry one line in the Northeast and get arrested."
Of course most westerners and expats like to talk about how horrible things are when you have to give up personal autonomy for a couple weeks in order to save a bunch of lives.
What I want to talk about (a few examples among hundreds):
* "the delievery guy had a traffic accident, blood all over, it's been an hour since calling 120 (emergency line). The police came, the guy's family came, 120 still haven't come"
* the many, many suicides. Due to mental health issues from lockdown, or unbearable physical pain that can't be alleviated without medical attention
* "Dear leaders, I want to take a shower" - because literally hundreds of thousands of university students are in dorm lockdown. Many of them are forbidden to take showers, and even need to take assigned numbers to use toilets
* the now-deleted witness account of seniors in mobile cabin hospitals. The majority of harrowing first-hand accounts are swiftly removed from social media, but they keep popping up
* "Are you human? Any humanity left?"
* the touching story of the woman who lived in a telephone booth for five days. I am not being sarcastic: the media are literally presenting this as a touching story of the government rescuing private citizens.
* Covid makes fire hazards irrelevant, apparently
* whatever the fuck this is
* Douban suspended comments on 1984 temporarily, in response to the widespread backlash over the removal of the video I posted in my earlier comment
* if you get it, you get it
----------------------------------------------------------------
But, sure, china LOL. Go ahead
I don't even know why I bother with MetaFilter anymore, especially with China-related topics.
Some of us care about China because we are ethnic Chinese, we have meaningful connections to living, breathing human beings in China. It's not about the West, much less mocking China from a Western perspective.
I. Care. About. Them.
posted by fatehunter at 12:34 PM on April 24, 2022 [47 favorites]
fatehunter, thank you for all those stories and links. I'm in the U.S., don't read Chinese, and don't have any current contact with friends in China. I don't know what the article omits or skews, though I'm aware it is very steeped in the anthropology academic lingo and framing, but I did appreciate learning about the experiences of people in Shenzhen.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:17 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:17 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
However, in the time required to analyse and resolve the problem, the building was locked down and the plumber had to live with the customer’s family for 14 days.
Sometimes rom-coms just write themselves.
posted by zardoz at 1:36 PM on April 24, 2022
Sometimes rom-coms just write themselves.
posted by zardoz at 1:36 PM on April 24, 2022
Fatehunter, thank you for linking the various stories/photos from weibo, they mirror what I get from my feed. Since the beginning of April, the hardest part for me has been watching all this go by and feeling powerless from thousands of miles away, beyond forwarding posts that cry for urgent medical help.
To share an anecdata point -- my dad is in his seventies and lives by himself in Shanghai and seems to be doing okay food-wise, but he's unvaccinated. He did try to get vaccinated last year, but was deemed ineligible due to high blood-pressure. After he became aware how ineffectual domestic Covid vaccines are at preventing infection, he gave up on the idea of getting vaccinated all together, to my great dismay.
Vaccination rates in Shanghai are quite low, especially for older folks like him, so it's understandable why the local government insists on strict lockdown measures, but the poor execution and rampant corruption is extracting heavy human tolls that should be preventable. So much waste, bad faith (cue 莲花清瘟, the touted traditional prophylactic for Covid, beh), callousness and pigheadedness, and there's no end in sight.
posted by of strange foe at 1:40 PM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
To share an anecdata point -- my dad is in his seventies and lives by himself in Shanghai and seems to be doing okay food-wise, but he's unvaccinated. He did try to get vaccinated last year, but was deemed ineligible due to high blood-pressure. After he became aware how ineffectual domestic Covid vaccines are at preventing infection, he gave up on the idea of getting vaccinated all together, to my great dismay.
Vaccination rates in Shanghai are quite low, especially for older folks like him, so it's understandable why the local government insists on strict lockdown measures, but the poor execution and rampant corruption is extracting heavy human tolls that should be preventable. So much waste, bad faith (cue 莲花清瘟, the touted traditional prophylactic for Covid, beh), callousness and pigheadedness, and there's no end in sight.
posted by of strange foe at 1:40 PM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
I don't think the choices are solely "mountain of dead bodies" or "authoritarian lockdowns, forever".
Unless and until a community achieves sufficient immunity via vaccination and/or mask mandates that a transmissible and potentially deadly disease's effective reproduction rate drops below 1 without contact restrictions being imposed, then those absolutely are the options.
Given that this has been shown to be the case by any number of real-world examples, then in any community where an epidemic isn't already raging out of control, the only sensible policy consideration becomes what needs to be done in order to minimize the length of time for which lockdowns need to be imposed and what needs to be done to compensate people for losses caused by those lockdowns.
Because new outbreaks do grow exponentially to a very good first approximation, the way to minimize the total amount of time spent in lockdowns is to impose the hardest lockdowns it's feasible to compensate people for, as soon as any community transmission is detected. Because by the time community transmission is detected, it's a dead cert that there are many times more undetected cases in that same community as well, and that these will proliferate if given the opportunity.
Nobody thinks that lockdowns are harmless. Everybody understands that they hurt people. And what continues to give me the howling fantods is commentators who blather on endlessly about that trivially obvious fact as if it were some kind of argument for not having lockdowns - as if the human and social and economic consequences of that policy choice were better rather than having repeatedly been shown to be many times worse.
posted by flabdablet at 1:40 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
Unless and until a community achieves sufficient immunity via vaccination and/or mask mandates that a transmissible and potentially deadly disease's effective reproduction rate drops below 1 without contact restrictions being imposed, then those absolutely are the options.
Given that this has been shown to be the case by any number of real-world examples, then in any community where an epidemic isn't already raging out of control, the only sensible policy consideration becomes what needs to be done in order to minimize the length of time for which lockdowns need to be imposed and what needs to be done to compensate people for losses caused by those lockdowns.
Because new outbreaks do grow exponentially to a very good first approximation, the way to minimize the total amount of time spent in lockdowns is to impose the hardest lockdowns it's feasible to compensate people for, as soon as any community transmission is detected. Because by the time community transmission is detected, it's a dead cert that there are many times more undetected cases in that same community as well, and that these will proliferate if given the opportunity.
Nobody thinks that lockdowns are harmless. Everybody understands that they hurt people. And what continues to give me the howling fantods is commentators who blather on endlessly about that trivially obvious fact as if it were some kind of argument for not having lockdowns - as if the human and social and economic consequences of that policy choice were better rather than having repeatedly been shown to be many times worse.
posted by flabdablet at 1:40 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
Late lockdowns - the kind we had in Australia, that needed to go on for months and months each - are terrible public policy failures caused by total political gutlessness.
posted by flabdablet at 1:43 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 1:43 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
spamandkimchi, thank you for making this post. The linked article is invaluable - it helps me (and hopefully others) understand better what Shenzhen did right.
Shenzhen really did well - it's not government spin, as far as people can tell. Why did it handle Omicron so much better than Hong Kong and Shanghai? Everyone concerned about China for whatever reason genuinely wants to know. We will/should spend years to study this.
of strange foe, I am sorry to hear about your father. Hope he will be okay. It's such a despairing situation all around.
About 莲花清瘟, omfg. There was a screencap making the rounds on weibo of the media breathlessly praising its creator's ~15 days of intense study~ to come up with the formula. The top hot take on my feed: even soy sauce takes 180 days to ferment.
I would laugh, if not for the fact that one of my fandom friends in Shanghai got 莲花清瘟 delivered to her twice, before she received any food. She actually worried about starving for a couple of days, because her building didn't have enough residents to make group-by feasible. Thankfully she got food deliveries eventually.
posted by fatehunter at 2:03 PM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
Shenzhen really did well - it's not government spin, as far as people can tell. Why did it handle Omicron so much better than Hong Kong and Shanghai? Everyone concerned about China for whatever reason genuinely wants to know. We will/should spend years to study this.
of strange foe, I am sorry to hear about your father. Hope he will be okay. It's such a despairing situation all around.
About 莲花清瘟, omfg. There was a screencap making the rounds on weibo of the media breathlessly praising its creator's ~15 days of intense study~ to come up with the formula. The top hot take on my feed: even soy sauce takes 180 days to ferment.
I would laugh, if not for the fact that one of my fandom friends in Shanghai got 莲花清瘟 delivered to her twice, before she received any food. She actually worried about starving for a couple of days, because her building didn't have enough residents to make group-by feasible. Thankfully she got food deliveries eventually.
posted by fatehunter at 2:03 PM on April 24, 2022 [2 favorites]
« Older Putting the penis on a pedestal. | Through The Looking Glass Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments