[Recorded on Sunday 10th September 2023. Expertly produced by Titi.]
I recently had the pleasure of talking to @FeuxFollets (a pseudonym). Feux is a Chinese national – though she has lived in the UK for almost a decade now – and had just returned from a holiday in China, her first since before the COVID-19 crisis began. She was there for about a week visiting family and friends, during which time she travelled from Hong Kong to Guangzhou to Beijing. Given that COVID-19 is a running theme of the blog, and that China is the ostensible ground-zero for both the virus and the Public Health response, we thought that it was worth recording a short, informal conversation about her on-the-ground impressions of Corona-China in the year 2023, as well as the Chinese response to the COVID-19 more generally.
We touched on masks in China (as well as Feux’s amusing reasons for refusing them), COVID-policy in Shanghai, the bottom-up popularity of Chinese lockdowns, and the absence of organised lockdown-scepticism in China.
To be clear, while she is highly perceptive and knowledgeable and has a personal awareness of Chinese affairs that few of us enjoy, most of what Feux says here is based on personal observations and anecdote, and so should be taken as opening questions about coronavirus in China rather than providing closed answers. Nonetheless, here are some articles and links that she thought would be helpful to share:
Han Zhang, 'How Shanghai Residents Endured the COVID Lockdown', The New Yorker, 7 June 2022
Foreign Staff, 'Close Xi ally and architect of Shanghai lockdown becomes China's No 2', The Telegraph, 11 March 2023
Reuters, 'Analysis: Why won’t the Shanghai epidemic interrupt Li Qiang’s career?', DW, 9 May 2022
BBC China, '中国新冠疫情持续升温，官方强调精准防疫并放宽“清零”政策', BBC, 11 November 2022
Fang Fang (2020) Wuhan Diary, self-published. [Link to Wiki here.]
I hope you enjoy!
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