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Food in the Shanghai Lockdown

2024; University of California Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/gfc.2024.24.1.25

1533-8622

Anna Greenspan,

Organic Food and Agriculture

It is late summer 2023, and I have just returned to Shanghai after some months away. The fall term at NYU Shanghai, where I teach, is about to begin. It is a familiar routine, but everyone knows that this year is different. A new wave in the city’s history has begun. In the early 2000s when I first arrived, Shanghai tasted of the future. At the 2010 World’s Fair, the metropolis revealed itself to the world as a riotous mix of glittering skyscrapers, dazzling infrastructure, street markets, dense laneways, and art deco heritage. Its hybrid culture enthusiastically embraced a romantic recollection of a future past that was poised and ready to be reborn as a central hub in the new millennium.For the past few years, this cosmopolitan openness has been under pressure, threatened by increasing geopolitical tensions and an authoritarian, inward turn. The COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point. In the first two years, as the rest of the world struggled, Shanghai—though sealed off—seemed to boom. The city witnessed an accelerated gentrification, as many who were stuck in town opened new restaurants, cafes, and cocktail bars. It was clear, however, with no planned endgame to its COVID-19 controls, that something would have to give. When the disease did finally hit the city, it brought an end to Shanghai’s most recent golden age.In March 2022, COVID-19 finally reached Shanghai. In 2020, after the initial outbreak had been brought under control, China adopted a stringent Zero-COVID approach (Qingling zhengce 清零政策), which kept the city largely virus free. Yet, once the highly transmissible Omicron variant started circulating worldwide, it became inevitable that the policy couldn’t hold. On March 11, it was reported that sixteen cases had leaked out of a quarantine hotel. Initially, the cosmopolitan metropolis tried, tentatively, to shift tactics, but the response was patently incoherent. Neighborhoods were divided. Some blocks, where cases had been reported, were totally closed off, guarded by an army of “Big Whites” dabai 大白 (the name given to the scores of people dressed in full hazmat suits who were hired or volunteered to implement the Zero-COVID policy). Adjacent streets and neighborhoods remained open with bustling stores and cafes filled with crowds eager to enjoy the spring atmosphere. News of sporadic lockdowns started popping up all over town. People were trapped and tested in shopping malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and office buildings. Everyone started to carry emergency overnight bags wherever they went. Soon, whole sections of town were roped off and boarded up.By March 27, just two weeks after community spread had first been reported, it was clear the government had decided that initial experiments of “living with the virus” would not be tolerated. So, after the rest of the world had given up most COVID-19 restrictions, Shanghai began what was to be a painful, traumatic, two-month lockdown that, in the end, was one of the strictest in the world. The severe lack of mobility, the restricted access to health care, and centralized quarantine camps were all highly distressing. It was the food crises brought on by quarantine, however, that made this a punctuating, historical event. The Shanghai lockdown made starkly apparent the complexity, as well as the precarity, of how the giant city feeds itself.When the first official announcement came, it stated the lockdown would occur in phases and last for five days. The Huangpu River, which divides the city into Eastern and Western halves, was taken as a hard boundary. Bridges were blocked and ferries closed. Online memes joked that Shanghai had come to resemble a popular yin/yang hot pot.Pudong, on the East of the river, had only a few hours to prepare. Predictably, the late-night panic buying was intense. In Puxi, on the West side of the river, residents had five days to stock up. A few days in, as rumors spread that the Pudong lockdown would be extended and that food shortages had already begun, the search for supplies became evermore frantic.In supermarkets, one witnessed frenzied struggles over the last leafy green vegetable. On March 30, a Shanghainese rap song about food fights went viral (Sixth Tone 2022). Street vendors—who had long been banned, condemned as a sign of backwardness that didn’t belong in the modern city—suddenly resurfaced to meet the needs of the emergency.On April 4, the city-wide lockdown began. The uncompromising nature of the Zero-COVID policies meant that, unlike in other places around the world, grocery stores and other essential services were forced to stay shut. All transport was halted, and only those with special licenses (tongxing zheng 通行证) were able to move. Almost immediately, the city’s culinary infrastructure was thrown into disarray. Trucks were stopped at the city’s border, and local distribution networks were slashed. Clandestine images appeared online showing vast piles of rotting groceries caused by lack of distribution. The price of vegetables skyrocketed so high that netizens began comparing them to luxury goods.On April 7, the government announced it was taking over food distribution. Neighborhood committees (juweihui 居委会), the long arm of the Communist party, who were delegated to manage the lockdown in each local area, were charged with delivering rations. As boxes of cheap and filling vegetables—turnips, cabbages, and carrots, the old staples of the planned economy—appeared at their doors, older residents recalled the diet they had grown up on.At first, all this was received with a degree of patriotic pride (my own community was especially delighted with the inclusion of a pigeon, which when roasted is served as a delicacy in the city’s finest dim sum restaurants). Dissatisfaction mounted, however, as people soon recognized the massive disparity among districts, with older communities that housed the most prominent party members faring best. As images started circulating online, residents in various districts—those receiving far fewer and less opulent rations—began protesting by hanging from their windows and banging pots and pans.With logistical systems so curtailed, online grocery delivery (xianshang shengxian peisong 线上生鲜配送), which had become commonplace in Shanghai, stopped working. People stayed awake through the night, repeatedly reloading apps, hoping to place an order in one of the few slots available. With even basic items in short supply, many stores no longer allowed the purchase of separate items but started selling “emergency boxes” instead. Throughout the period, my family kept a log of the surreal experience, which we called our “Plague Diary.” It is almost entirely devoted to food. Entries read as follows: “April 6, ‘no milk available’; April 8, ‘bought milk with neighbor’s help, who knows when it will arrive’; April 10, ‘kind neighbor slipped us some sugar.’” On April 11, we recorded a muted celebration of a delivery of one supermarket’s emergency box: “Sad replenishment of supplies. RMB 450 for a chunk of pork and a few vegetables.”In less than a week, Shanghai residents, accustomed to a tremendously rich culinary landscape, were suffering from food insecurity. Throughout the city, community WeChat groups that had formed during mandatory neighborhood testing became a lifeline. Neighbors used this grassroots form of communication to self-organize group buys (tuangou 团购), which became one of the main ways Shanghai fed itself during lockdown.Each community had specific group buying captains (tuanzhuang 团长) who had contact with distributors, collected payment from each buyer, coordinated with the neighborhood committee (juweihui 居委会), ensured that boxes were sanitized upon arrival, and arranged delivery to residents who were locked in their homes. Group buys work by purchasing large quantities of a single item. Daily specials were continuously updated in each community, and everyone spent most of their time glued to their phones, hoping something they wanted would be listed. When a desired item did appear, one tended to buy in bulk because of the complete uncertainty of supplies. There were government restrictions on what was deemed “nonessential foods” (feibixu pin 非必需品) and randomly announced “silent periods” (jingmo qi 静默期), when even group buy deliveries were suspended. At one point during lockdown, we had a store of ninety eggs (all eaten) and over ten kilograms of flour (which we later lost in a move).Group buy was but one form of civil society that developed in this time of emergency. Neighbors banded together to exchange food and recipes and to help the elderly and others who seemed to be suffering.This civil society, which spontaneously emerged to deal with the collapse of the culinary infrastructure during lockdown, shows the power of urban resilience, even when a dramatic crisis in city food is produced by the state.Lockdown lifted in stages. By the end of May 2022, residents in certain areas with low case counts were issued special passes to enter designated supermarkets in their neighborhood. On May 29, officials announced the end of the city-wide lockdown. What followed was the most profoundly Kafkaesque period of COVID-19 controls seen yet. Testing stations had been placed all over town. Individual QR codes tracked the time since your last negative results, counting down 24, 48, and 72 hours. The rules to enter and exit offices, entertainment establishments, and apartment blocks were both intensely rigid and constantly changing. Residents no longer used the common greeting chi le ma 吃了吗 (have you eaten?). Instead, the most oft-heard refrain in Shanghai was shou bu liao 受不了 (it’s unbearable).This impossible situation lasted through November 2022, when economic stresses, widespread protests, and climbing COVID-19 numbers in Beijing led to a stunning reversal. On December 7, 2022, the Zero-COVID policy that had governed the country since early 2020 suddenly and completely collapsed. Within two weeks, all of mainland China was engulfed in a giant COVID-19 wave. Spring saw a slow, cautious reemergence. Now, eight months later as I write this, much on the surface has returned to normal. The city is once again filled with culinary delights, and new bars, restaurants, cafes, and specialty stores are opening. Few remnants of the food crisis in lockdown remain (a scattering of people still use group buy to save on special purchases, keen to keep a full pantry at home). By far the strongest response, however, is the collective strategy to forget. Nevertheless, the city is haunted by an unspoken aftermath, a traumatic reminder that it has suffered severe, radical disturbance in the past and could at any point be crushed again. Albert Camus, in the last lines of The Plague, contrasts the jubilant crowd celebrating the end of the disease with a haunting warning: “Such joy is always imperilled…the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” (Camus 1991: 308) It can lie dormant for years, bide its time, and one day resurface. Perhaps, if we are lucky, the same can be said for the dynamic futurism that drives Shanghai’s golden ages—those in the past and those still to come.Special thanks go to Tracey Lan for her valuable assistance in conducting research for this article.