Last week, I was delicately reminded by a friend that to all intents and purposes, I have been MIA for the last 3 years.
Why? Suffice to say that for all of us here in China, SARS-CoV-2 - living proof that not all that is new is also novel - not only snipped our wings and narrowed our horizons, it also slapped us across the face, knocked us to the ground and then kicked us in the balls.
Repeatedly.
Of course, I know that the pandemic has been terrible for us all everywhere - and sadly for some, continues to be terrible -but as many of you will know from the headlines, the adoption of a zero-covid strategy in China effectively meant that 1.4 billion people (or should that actually be 1.28?) have been prisoners for almost 3 years, with the border effectively closed, and almost no flights out and even fewer in.
As some of you may remember, I arrived in Beijing in March 2020 days before China’s doors shut, and for the longest time, even when there were flights out (and leaving Beijing meant flying to Shanghai first as there were no international flights from here at all) seat were going for stratospheric, almost hallucinatory amounts.
At one point in early 2022, when you actually COULD fly back to London without having to charter a private jet (I’m not joking), you had to produce three negative tests taken within 72 hours of departure, your fastest route was a 50+ hour marathon via Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, Frankfurt/Oslo and then London (all on different carriers) and there was no guarantee that even with a valid work permit and visa, you’d be allowed back in to China after, especially not if there was an outbreak in the country you planned to return from. Even if you were, you had to produce the same paperwork in reverse, then quarantine for 7-14 days at your point of arrival (which was generally Shanghai or Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia), then AGAIN at a quarantine hotel on arrival in Beijing (for anywhere up to 21 days) and then often at home for a week before you’d be okayed to go back to work and during the entire period, you’d be tested daily - twice daily if you were really lucky. Oh, and you’d also need to fork out £25-35,000 (excluding tests and quarantine) for the privilege. And that was for a seat in Economy….
Even travelling around China, which was not always permitted if you were a Beijing resident (we had far stricter controls here than anywhere else), was a nightmare. A brief business trip to Zhejiang Province late last year required three days of negative testing before the flight to Hangzhou, one on the morning of departure, another at Hangzhou International and then just for good measure, a third in the hotel lobby after our bags were disinfected for the n-th time that day. It goes without saying that we were all fully inoculated as well as masked at all times.
Over the course of the next four days, we were tested every morning in the hotel, and then because we were travelling between cities in the province, we not only had to download a health code app for each (as well as the provincial health code app, which we already had on top of the Beijing health code app), and fill them all out with exactly the same details, including a list of all the (negative) tests we’d done in the last seven days, we also had to scan QR codes everywhere we went so that our movements were comprehensively tracked. that part, though, was familiar, as in Beijing, you had to scan a QR code and show the guard you weren’t infected every time you entered a building, the subway or a bus. Even in malls, where you would have to line up and scan/present at one of the entrances that wasn’t locked, you’d STILL have to scan/present at every shop/cafe/restaurant you walked into, even when they’d just seen you scan at the main entrance. Naturally, shopping became a colossal chore.
On top of that, because China accorded a degree of autonomy to each province and to each subdivision of said province, when it came to setting COVID test policies, as we travelled between cities, we’d invariably cross a boundary and have to be tested again. On the most annoying day, we were tested 4 times in the space of 9 hours.
Over the course of seven days (3 days prior, 4 days on the road), I was tested 19 times. One evening, we were even pulled over by the side of the motorway because three of the group members had forgotten to test in the hotel that morning, and while the rest of us weren’t tested, a special team of flying hazmat-suited testers went to town on them as we watched. Because the rapid antigen tests were considered less reliable, the procedure was repeated until the testers were satisfied none of them was infected, and one of the three them was tested five times. Always up the nose. Not only did that little slip-up add three hours onto our already lengthy day, we were then forced to spend the night at a desolate quarantine hotel rather than the swank resort that had been booked, until their results came in the following morning, just in case.
As final punishment, our Beijing health codes all turned red, even though our trackers showed that none of us had been anywhere near an outbreak. So we then each had to individually plead/produce reams of evidence to prove that we’d tested, we were negative and we hadn’t been anywhere ‘high-risk’ (which meant anywhere that had registered a SINGLE case) in order to be granted a temporary code that would permit us to catch the return flight, and that ONLY on the condition that we agreed to be quarantined (thankfully at home) for seven days, during which we would be tested at random times to ensure that we didn’t go out.
And that was us lucking out. A few months earlier, we would have been stranded in Zhejiang, forced to quarantine in place until the authorities in Beijing - which doesn’t just mean the health authorities, but more crucially, the neighbourhood committee, the elderly volunteers who had the actual power to decide whether or not you could come home and who, not being specialists, generally preferred to err on the side of caution and refuse - permitted you to return, at which point you’d have been quarantined first in a temporary hospital (which were varying degrees of Hell), and then afterwards, at home.
Some benighted souls then found themselves being locked into their apartments by the committee, who attached external locks to your apartment door, to make sure they didn’t leave. Many, (viz summer 2022 travellers to Xinjiang, Tibet and Hainan Island from less ferociously guarded cities) got trapped for weeks, testing daily, waiting for the green light to go home and two further rounds of quarantine. Even those who didn’t travel could get caught out by snap lockdowns. Stories of people locked out of their residential compound (most Chinese homes fall into the compound category), at the office, trying to get back to the office, or on a blind date abounded, though at least the latter had a romantic ending as the pair later married. I even remember reading of a delivery man - home deliveries basically kept the country going when the shops were closed and you couldn’t go to the supermarket - who got caught out by a snap lockdown while out on a delivery and was locked into a residential compound just a few metres from his motorbike. He spent 4 days sleeping on the pavement until he was finally allowed out.
I am not recounting this to criticise (though I will admit to many a choice thought over the last few years), or to shame China. It did what it thought best and while I have many reservations about the zero-COVID policy, for 2020 and part of 2021, lockdown worked.. But for the last year of our almost 3 year ordeal, things became progressively harder. You avoided going out for fear of getting caught in a snap lockdown, you ordered everything in (although you’d have to go downstairs or to the compound gate to pick up your delivery, because the couriers weren’t allowed into the building), and you adapted to every new requirement and imposition, as mandatory weekly testing became testing every 72 hours, then every 48 and then, for a while every day. When early last year, a testing station was installed at work, it meant that we didn’t have to stand in line for up to an hour-and-half at a time to get tested at the public booth, but it also signalled that the nightmare wasn’t going away any time soon.
Towards the end of 2022, with few people on the streets, cafes and restaurants offering takeaway service only, no cinema, no live music, museums arbitrarily opening and closing, no parks (most in Beijing are gated and all the gates were locked), and no sign of an end, Beijing was effectively locked down in all but name.
Sure, we weren’t trapped in our apartments, as hundreds of millions of others were elsewhere - watching Shanghai’s 2-month ordeal was especially horrific - but when you went out, there was nowhere to go except the supermarket, when it was open, anyway.. But worst of all was growing dread that, given the continual exhortations about the need to fight a ‘peoples war’ against the virus, this nightmare was never going to end.
I know that most of you have been there, although probably not to such an extreme degree or for so long, so I’m not trying to elicit sympathy, but let’s just say that the last three months of last year were very, very (very) dark.
But now, everything has changed. Overnight. Zero-covid is history. The entire country is/has been sick, and while the statistics (which don’t officially exist) must be horrific, for the first time in a long while, it feels good to be alive. Really, really good. To make up for the last three years of stasis, I have just returned from the Ice Festival in Harbin, as well as four days in the Gobi Desert visiting the gob-smacking Buddhists caves in Mogao and Yulin, and have a year of weekend trips, small excursions and (yes!) international jaunts planned.
There are also other developments, including my incipient foray into the wonderful world of becoming a self-published novelist to share, but this weeks post is just to tell you that, as Elton once sang The Bitch is Back, and to say that I’ll be posting about both recent trips soon, and while I understand if you don’t believe me, I will try to be better at posting updates on my life in once again exciting China in the weeks to come.