THE HELL OF ZERO COVID:
Imagine a nation in such a state of distress that its citizens were reduced to bartering for food. A nation where women were so desperate for something to cook and eat that they started swapping sanitary towels for vegetables. A nation where families were so hungry that they would trade their cigarettes for a cabbage. This country actually exists. And it isn’t one of the poor, sometimes famished nations of the global South. It’s China. More accurately, it’s China under the policy of ‘Zero Covid’. If you want to witness the hell of Zero Covid, the dystopian derangement of subordinating every facet of life to the crusade against coronavirus, look no further than the country where this virus first emerged.
The bartering for grub and other basic supplies is taking place in the city of Xi’an in north-west China right now. There has been a spike in community Covid infections in Xi’an and the authorities have responded with ferocious authoritarianism. Thirteen million people have been confined to their homes since 23 December. Initially they were allowed out once every two days to buy food, but even that infinitesimal scrap of liberty was done away with on 27 December. Since then, the people of Xi’an have been under literal house arrest. They are not permitted to leave their place of residence for any reason, not even to buy food. Yes, for the past nine days 13million people have been locked in their own homes; if they take so much as a step outside, they risk arrest.
To get around the rather important matter that people will become gravely ill if they don’t have food, officialdom in Xi’an has arranged to deliver essentials to people’s front doors. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. Residents have complained about not receiving enough to eat. Others say they have received no aid at all. Citizens have taken to Weibo to share images and videos of themselves bartering for foodstuffs. In one clip, a desperate man offers a Nintendo console for some instant noodles and steamed buns. Another offers dishwashing liquid for apples. People ‘no longer have enough food to eat’, one Xi’an resident told Radio Free Asia. Another said Xi’an has witnessed a ‘return to primitive society’. . . . Zero Covid is not just a ‘Chinese thing’. No, here in the supposedly free West, too, numerous experts and observers openly lobbied for Zero Covid policies, for the subjugation of liberty and the joys of life to a programme of ensuring that Covid could never gain a foothold in our society. ‘Zero Covid’, over the past year, has become a little like the campaign slogan ‘Defund the police’, in that the people who pushed this policy now deny that it is actually what they wanted.
Public health is too important to be left to the public health authorities, especially as they seem to be incompetent, power-mad, and generally hateful toward ordinary people.