It requires four hours and the equivalent of £40 to travel first class along the 800km of railway between Wuhan and Shanghai. In geographical terms, for China, it is a short trip.

Yet it is a journey that SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic that was first found in Wuhan in late 2019, has seemingly rarely made. As of May 5^th 2020, only 656 cases, and 7 deaths had occurred in Shanghai, according to China’s Office for National Statistics, a remarkably small number for a city only behind Tokyo and Delhi in terms of population yet sitting on the doorstep of the original source.

Scepticism towards those figures is certainly warranted. China’s reputation for unreliable data has bred heavy Sino-cynicism, and problems with statistics have blighted global reporting as nations use different and frequently changing case criteria. Nonetheless, it would require lies or incompetence of outrageous levels for Shanghai, with numbers currently below Dudley and St Helens, to be hiding figures similar to London or New York.    

The question is, therefore, how has a global financial hub, with a highly concentrated population, seemingly managed so well?

‘The most afraid of death people in China’

The official timeline of the Covid-19 outbreak began on December 31^st, 2019, when China alerted the World Health Organisation to a new form of pneumonia occurring in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Shanghai’s first case was announced three weeks later, on January 20^th. The city’s first death was January 26^th.

Yet residents of Shanghai knew the disease was coming well before any official confirmation.

“In December 2019 I heard some news from my friends in Wuhan,” says Li Dan, a 35-year-old water quality scientist.

“They told me about a virus, so I told my family that the duck, Wuhan Zhou, the black duck – I said don’t eat Wuhan Zhou Hei. That’s the first thing I did.”

Avoiding spicy duck snacks was a token gesture, but it exemplified a cautious mindset that Mrs Li ascribes to the Shanghainese being ‘the most afraid of death people in China’. When Wuhan locked down on January 23^rd, many in Shanghai willed their own city to follow. The Shanghai government’s initial reticence to appease these demands was an unofficial reason Mayor Ying Yong was moved upwards, becoming Party Secretary of Hubei where he now oversees Wuhan’s Covid-19 strategy.

“Shanghai is a famous open city in China, and Ying Yong didn’t want Shanghai to be strictly locked down,” Li Dan explains.

“So the Shanghainese didn’t want him. Many people wrote things in blogs about the central government, and so Ying Yong was sent to Wuhan. It’s very ridiculous.”

Spring Festival: a convenient catalyst for quarantine

Shanghai never did lockdown as forcefully as Wuhan. The city government advised citizens to stay home, and they did, but there was no top-down command. Yet population control was assisted by a compensating break within the calendar: the Spring Festival.  

The Spring Festival ‘Golden Week’ holiday, built around the lunar New Year, sees non-Shanghainese return to their home towns en masse. With the 2010 census listing 39% of Shanghai’s residents as long-term migrants – and the 2020 version, due in November, likely placing that number even higher – it constitutes a significant population drop. In 2020, Golden Week was scheduled from January 25^th to January 30^th, directly on the tail of Shanghai’s first Covid-19 case.

This coincidence made implementing restrictions on those returning to the city possible, and they were restrictions that lasted. When technical college administrator Ivy Zhang, 36, flew back from a relatively virus-free Europe on February 15^th, her trip not only included mandatory face masks, temperature checks, and an almost deserted Pudong airport, but concluded with two weeks of self-isolation at home.

Self-imposed quarantine began with paranoia.

“I disinfected everything, crazily. When my mum came back in I sprayed everything with disinfectant: her clothes, the bags she brought. I was just feeling there was virus everywhere in the air. That was not good.”

By the end Ivy was enjoying reading and having her colleagues doing her work for her. Life could have been worse, and for those arriving as her isolation finished, it was.

“If I had come back two weeks later, I would have been quarantined in a special place. They would have sent me to a hotel. Or, if my parents agreed, they would been quarantined with me together and none of us could go out.”

Rules certainly did tighten in March as China switched its Covid-19 focus from internal suppression to incoming prevention.

There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’, but there are a few in ‘social distancing’

Spring Festival, once feared as a potential medium for mass contagion, had become a convenient buffer. It was consequently extended nationally until February 2^nd, and to February 9^th by Shanghai and many other authorities. Eventually, however, the need to put people safely back into offices had to be addressed.  

Measures introduced to minimise employee numbers encompassed staggered working hours and staff rotation. Employees were encouraged to drive to work, rather than use the subway. The issuing of masks to all staff was a mandatory requirement for any business wishing to reopen. In Shanghai Pudong Development Bank’s policy department, Lenny Wang, 37, experienced a new style of work.

“The first day we just had one person per department in the office each day, and that lasted for about a month. But not all departments did it this way. In several other departments three or four people did one week, and after that another three or four did the next,” he says.

Non-office days meant taking bank computers home, with the unwelcome disadvantage of removing official hours so staff ‘worked until you finished’. Added complications came from having two children – a seven-year old daughter, and a son, aged three – who had no school to attend and therefore roamed the house. It was not long until the kids began to spend more time at their grandparents’.

Across town, at German auto parts manufacturer ZF’s Asia Pacific headquarters, Lenny’s wife Wei Jia was experiencing changes to even the most mundane office matters. Rules stipulating employees had to sit one metre apart meant the lunch room resembled an exam hall.

What rotation and social distancing could not amend was the damage to income and job security. Many staff were given only 70% of their salaries, and plenty had no work at all. Novel schemes were started, such as permitting restaurant staff to become temporary delivery drivers, and the government issued vouchers akin to ration books. Businesses were granted social security contribution discounts, which included 50% for large businesses until the end of April, and 100% for mid, small and micro companies until the end of June.

At ZF, however, the virus’s move west meant pressures came from other continents. Factories in Europe and America closed, and decisions in Friedrichshafen have weakened the Shanghai office’s recovery.

“Our customers are still open. Our bureau is still working well. The problem is our mother company, and the policy is the same for the whole company. Now we have a policy which says everything stops,” explains Wei Jia.

“Since BMW and other customers are shut down, we are almost shut down.”

Brave New World

Shutting down is a reactionary and rudimentary form of prevention. Instigating new post-Covid-19 living, conversely, has required more craft, for which technology is a key tool. Compared to Europe or America, China – Shanghai included – has been far keener to seek solutions in mobile devices and computers. Considering it is a nation where smartphone addiction is prevalent enough to be a recognised medical condition, this may have always been likely.

The endeavour to use one disease to cure another has seen two pieces of technology become commonplace in Shanghai. The first, as elsewhere, is conferencing software such as Zoom, with entire industries such as education becoming almost exclusively online.

“My routine is basically breakfast, online classes, lunch, online classes, dinner, and sometimes online classes, from Monday to Friday,” says Echo Xia, a 20-year-old sophomore law student who went ‘back’ to school on March 1^st.

Inevitably, this shift in delivery systems has resulted in winners (early adapters, predatory capitalists) and losers (traditional establishments, tutors, and arguably the students).

“Online classes seem like a new trend. Lots of apps and businesses are doing online class. It’s a booming business for these two or three months,” explains Fiona Liu, a Chinese tutor who has been trying to avoid the switch.

Yet placing full trust in computers is impossible, and it was no coincidence that, on April 27^th, the first students allowed back on campus were high school seniors facing the gaokao. Already postponed for the first time since the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this deeply stressful exam is the presiding judge over twelve years of schooling. A complete cancellation has not happened since the Cultural Revolution.  

The second prevalent technological tool is one which is a requirement of students and workers alike.‘Traffic light’ health passports, held on smartphones and updated by scanning QR codes at locations around the city, are designed to show an individual’s potential exposure to Covid-19. A green screen has become the key to everywhere, from returning to an office to stepping inside a restaurant.

As well as being enough to inspire a civil liberty lament, the hard science of the passports is dubious. Tracking where people have been, rather than who they have seen, has produced single households with green (fine), yellow (isolate for a week), and red (two weeks quarantine) screens.

Yet uptake has been almost whole scale. The upside of being allowed outside, as well as feeling part of the solution rather than awaiting government decree, are plain. Potential barriers, meanwhile, were minimal. Notions of phone privacy have been long lost, as SIM card registration made real names mandatory in 2016, followed by enforced facial recognition last December. That the passports are attached to popular apps Alipay and Wechat, as well as a less-used Shanghai-only version, means little effort is needed to participate.

Health passports have helped people in Shanghai move more freely than those in many liberal democracies. The concern is whether that liberty is superior, or signals the start of a Brave New World, replete with all the dystopian connotations that phrase evokes. Yet that worry is, on an everyday level, far behind whether measures will continue to keep Shanghai shielded, and how long these measures must last. Furthermore, people are just relieved to be outside. As another Golden Week arrived at the beginning of May, the Shanghai government reported over a million visitors hit its tourist attractions in just two days. In China as a whole, nearly 80% of young adults planned to go on more holidays once restrictions were over. People are dreaming of different passports. For all Shanghai’s apparent success in dealing with the pandemic, it seems people have had quite enough of living this way.