⌈ Translation ⌋ Shanghai lost its color

Original link: https://fmcf.cc/life/904/

This is a blog post written by Jaap Grolleman , a Dutchman living in Shanghai. The original Shanghai’s stunning fall from grace was published on his personal blog on April 9, 2022.

FMCF blogger transferred from [translation] Shanghai loses its color

When I first came to Shanghai in 2017, I was amazed by this developed city. I’ve only been to Mumbai before in Asia, and compared to Shanghai, it’s clean and well organized. What amazes me even more is that the ubiquitous mobile payments, shared bicycles on the street, takeaways delivered in half an hour, and numerous skyscrapers, most of which have been established in this decade. You can gulp about the political environment, but the people here seem to be very hardworking and optimistic, and China’s GDP has been growing incredibly strongly for over four decades, and Shanghai is a shining example of it all.

However, that Shanghai tone fades out slowly, and then disappears all at once – just like some people suddenly fall in love or fall out of love. Now is the ninth day of quarantine. During this period, we have only left the house for a few minutes because we have to do four nucleic acid tests. Another time is because the security said that the water we bought online was too heavy and refused to send it to our door. , while other express delivery can be delivered to the door. (Well, I bought sixty liters of water, but not just for our household.)

It’s only the ninth day, and we’re lucky — some have been in the house for over a month. We can’t decide what to eat every day, because it’s really hard to get food in, but we’re lucky — some people are really desperate enough to have instant noodles, or lack of medicine. While the city government is delivering food, we have only received a small packet of vegetables during these nine days. But it’s not just food that people lack: Parents can’t print their students’ homework because the printers have run out of ink; and people don’t have cooking oil, laundry detergent, diapers, sanitary pads, toilet paper, or medicine (even heard of there being lack of sleeping pills).

We work from home, but we’re still lucky — a lot of people can’t work remotely (due to the nature of their jobs) and can only watch their savings dwindle or their businesses take a turn for the worse.

Maybe everything is not as simple as we thought. The security guards are not the friends we think they are. There are videos circulating online of them beating to death the pet dogs of residents who tested positive for nucleic acid, and using megaphones to intimidate citizens in person. Together with the neighborhood committee, they decide which couriers can be delivered to your door: vegetables, meat, and staple foods are fine, but beverages and fruit are not.

This happened, not because the security has changed. The security guards have always enforced the minutiae of rules and orders, but now those rules have changed — obviously, they don’t have the slightest bit of flexibility. In the past, the security guards were a bit goofy, but they were always friendly. With the city locked down, they became less friendly after suddenly taking control, but still a little naive. They’re no longer just picking up trash or directing you to back into the garage, they’re blocking gates, preventing people from leaving the community to go to the hospital, and suddenly their decisions are life and death .

Meanwhile, the national media is busy debunking rumors . Two weeks ago , before Shanghai was locked down, two people were arrested for spreading news that Shanghai was about to be locked down. It has been found that the state media does not exist to accurately report the news, but mainly to invent the reality desired by those in power.

Shanghai, once touted as a luxury pet hotel or a superficial internet celebrity restaurant for people to take selfies, now we only see makeshift hospitals in poor conditions (they’re not really hospitals, more like hangars). I am not afraid of the new crown virus, but I am afraid that after testing positive, I am immediately sent to inhumane isolation, sharing a toilet with hundreds of other people for two weeks, no bathing and no privacy.

However, it’s not all bad. There are many stories of ordinary people helping each other , and for me, the people in this building are unbelievably friendly: our family received sanitizing alcohol from one neighbor; we also gave carrots to another neighbors; other neighbors in the group ask who has cigarettes, diapers, or cooking oil. We established a lot of grocery shopping groups and bought a lot of supplies together. Although many orders were cancelled, some were eventually delivered.

We can’t live without our phones all day to see if we can grab an order in a food delivery app or WeChat group. Also, we watch videos in Reddit, Twitter and Telegram that cannot be shared on WeChat. The person in charge of our building will send us information and the latest situation, I hope everyone can receive it (and reply “received” in the group), and colleagues are also sharing their own loss and emoji. Although the work efficiency is low , we are lucky. At least we still have work and we can take care of other things, which means — I can allocate five days of work to this whole week.

I crave exercise: I want to go for a bike ride, a run, and a walk in the park. Every morning, I would sit on the window sill on the northeast side of the house to bask in the sun, and in the afternoon go to the bathroom window on the northwest side to continue basking in the sun. By the window, we can chat with our neighbors. I slowly remembered their faces, and the way they hung their clothes. Gotta say, there’s something romantic about lighting a candle at night, listening to Miles Davis on the stereo, and looking out the window — but we probably won’t be able to do that any more soon, because Mosquito season has arrived and we are not able to order mosquito nets online.

Our apartment overlooked a small square with a small pavilion. A positive case was confirmed in the building opposite us, so the door to that building was locked with a bicycle lock. There’s a guy in a hazmat suit sleeping under a kiosk, looking at his (or her?) phone all day, only responsible for opening the lock in the event of a fire or emergency (I guess). The men and women in hazmat suits are called “Big White,” which is also the name of Baymax in Disney’s “Super Marines.” They are a notch above the security guards in terms of intelligence because they are more likely to be young people with good education, or volunteers from other provinces and cities – sent to Shanghai to help – but they are the same as the security guards , there are also many videos of Dabai’s violent behavior circulating online. They are not seen as heroes like they were in Wuhan two years ago, but maybe because Wuhan was a tragedy caused by an unknown virus, and this lockdown feels like chasing a dream of eradicating the new crown. It could also be that this is simply because of our perception in this lockdown; if we were in Wuhan at the time, maybe we would have looked at these big whites from a different angle too.

In the blocked building, someone yelled at Da Bai or anyone passing by to bring in the vegetables she ordered, which were now rotting outside the locked building door. But people don’t have keys, and those who have keys don’t necessarily care. In the evening, the door of the building was opened, and a group of big whites came in to take nucleic acid tests in front of the houses of the residents-because they were not allowed to go outside the building for nucleic acid tests like we did.

This is China’s largest, richest and most cosmopolitan city, but people are starving, lacking medicines and having no freedom. Parents are separated from their children , the army is on the streets, the people of Shanghai are less optimistic, and we’re back at the bottom of the Pyramid of Malos. I’m sure Shanghai will recover eventually, but will her pride come back? For two years, foreigners have been hearing about how raging the virus is and how safe China is, everywhere outside of China. This gives the entire lockdown a sense of “identity politics,” as abandoning the zero policy would force China to abandon that narrative as well.

In the Netherlands, as in the US, you can still be a patriot even if you are disappointed with your country. But in China, it’s not acceptable, you have to be patriotic unconditionally, and if you criticize her, you’ll be seen as a traitor. I want to say a word that starts with F. I love Shanghai, but not in this way, it’s like seeing a close friend fall. Take me back to those stupid high-priced dishes just for taking pictures and not eating; take me back to the karaoke room in the subway station. Late-night subways, boys and girls taking photos under the phoenix tree in France, aunties visiting the Bund from all over the country, elderly people dancing square dancing in the park, crowded Starbucks and hot pot restaurants that have to queue for more than an hour. Please, Shanghai, let me see what the best shining example in all of China can do. Please hurry, because my legs are sore from staying at home.

epilogue _{by FMCF blogger}

What I love the most about Shanghai in this world is this city, I don’t allow anyone to speak ill of it, so I attribute all this to the top of the GOV, where my speech will be limited, as Jaap Grolleman said ” People are finding out that state media exists not for accurate news, but mainly to spin reality into a narrative that fits the powers higher up. “, I can’t speak out about many things, there are many reasons for this problem, one is that with the As I grew up, I became more and more eager to see through the unknown things hidden behind the world. On the other hand, today’s GOV has done more and more excessive things because of the epidemic over the years, and it seems more and more unworthy. The two words PR (People’s Republic), as the word says, is the people’s republic, not the GOV’s dictatorship, but this doesn’t fit the definition we got to Baidu, “The People’s Republic is a society under the dictatorship of the proletariat or the people’s democratic dictatorship So let’s look at it again, we seem to be starting to move towards the route of getting rid of the people’s dictatorship , because the Chairman here is engaging in a cult of personality, and his influence is gradually controlling the PC (People’s Congress), an institution with the highest PR power, making His GOV can achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat, but is this the dictatorship of the “proletariat” class? It is worth pondering, the power and financial resources behind many high-ranking officials exposed by the media, as well as the families of their friends, those officials with Power can easily obtain a lot of money and other things, or a word can change a For the future of people, take high school borrowing as an example. If an average family wants to go to a better school for borrowing, it means finding a lot of people and spending 5W or 10W, but they can do it with just one sentence. , there will always be someone who will send them something and let them do these things, but they never fall off the horse, and the result is that “proletariat” is just a noun and no longer has a descriptive meaning. I still say: There are no folds in your heart, and when you go to spring, do you have no folds in your heart?

Finally, I want to say that for the truth we aspire to, we do need to sacrifice something, maybe even life and freedom, but this is a last resort, and I don’t think the world will be so confused now.

In the future, I may write more such things, and suggest that domain names and the like should be distributed abroad…

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