Shanghai's Lockdown 2022

I'm sure if you read international news, you probably hear about lockdown in Shanghai starting in April. The most obvious reason I became interested in mapping this issue because I grew up in Shanghai, so a lot of my friends and family are influenced by the lockdown now. Also, it is because I know this is not the only lockdown with severe problems that happened in China, and I also know there would be more. While in the news we can hear about  individual stories  on censorship and its results (which are still very important), I want to harness the new skill I learned to bring a bigger picture into the discourse.

CW: human rights violation.

So, why does Shanghai matter?

It's not just because it's famous. In fact, its fame might cause people ignoring the fact that lockdowns in China happen far beyond the scope of (both Western and Chinese natoinal) media coverage.

Shanghai is the first one that receives world-wide media attention this year. With more than 25 million residents, it has the second largest population in a city in the world. It serves as the financial center and has the biggest port in China, which also was the port with the largest anual throughput in the world. A lockdown that happens in this city in particular would have a wide range of impacts.

Zero Covid strategy is not new at all. When Australia adapted the policy, the covid case worsens while the economy was crippling (Hedge). When Shanghai adopted the more specific lockdowns in 2021, scholars found that the pregnant women suffer from higher risk of Preterm birth than when there's no lockdown (Lin et. al). Even when there's not a strict lockdown as what China and many other countries implemented, spillover effect harms financial stability on a global scale, which might have a more sustained negative effect than the virus itself. (Shezad et al)  Reuters  reported on the weakest growth in export for the past two years compared to its rapid rise in the past two decades, yet the restrictions are still tightening and expanding to other parts of the country.

OK, but lockdown does seem to be a reasonable COVID19 public health policy to some extent...

Pausing all the emergency care for dealing covid is as scary as it sounds, but there are other chronic disease concerns too. Yang et al. shows that due to the significant decrease in outdoor activities, the youth in China have higher risk of obesity and increased screen time because of online schooling and lack of other means of entertainment. Du et al. show that the mental health of students and medical staffs are the most heavily affected due to lockdown, and we have seen multiple suicide incidents in the city in the videos already. Given that the death rate of omicron is lower than the other variants with a much higher transmission rate, it is reasonable to take priorities in other aspects of health care.

Furthermore, it is not lockdown that is "unreasonable". The more important question to ask is, what are the impacts? Also, how CCP implements lockdowns is very different from what lockdowns look like in the U.S and Europe in 2020-2021. With the much higher infectious rate of Omicron variant compared to the other varient, lockdown is simply very inefficient in solving the problem.

I would also argue that because we need to do testings on a daily basis, gatherings is still very common (when people wait in line), so I doubt if lockdown actually helps with controlling the disease at all within the city. If that's not even the intention (let's say the end goal is only to make sure the disease doesn't spread to other places in China), what happens now in Shanghai is not unique because it can happen in somewhere else which has the same tactic.

This makes studying Shanghai more important with its scale and publicity as an infamous city in the world.

How do we even learn about it then?

My intention with this project is to illustrate the distribution of resources needed from different districts of Shanghai, and in doing so, testify some of the hypothesis to predict which areas might be most vulnerable.

Collecting Data

• Absence of official data: due to severe censorship and chaotic management, currently there is no relieable data source available.
• A website was established for people to ask for help, so that resources could be distributed more efficiently.
• I collaborated with my friend to scape data from this website, in the hope that 1) if the website is taken down because of censorship, there would be a backup and 2) It can serve as an open dataset for future analysis, since it does contain a lot of information useful for public health policy making.

Using python, I wrote the script to scrape the data from this webiste. Then we published it on Mastodon, a fediverse social media, and someone contributed to make the script auto-update from the website every 4 hours. I wouldn't include the coding details here, but in case you are interested, the Github page is here:

Updating and cleaning data. Navigate the spillover effect within the description of the request information.

I came into the class wondering, the idea of community is quite new to me, because as a city person, I did not even know the name of my neighbor who lived right accross my door (we live in apartments). However, the lockdown of Shanghai shows me how community really matters:

1. In a disruption like this lockdown, community is the most immediate resource for people to receive help.
2. Internet communities can also be very powerful. The platform I scraped data from can be one of such examples. Up until now, approximately 60% of the requests have been resolved, while others are in the progress.
3. Solidarity within the community can help the members conquring obstacles. In the events of not having enough food/medicine, people offer help to each other.
4. The "organizers" of the communities would have great impacts on the members. The reason the "old" neighborhoods seem to have more dysfunction than the others is not because they are not helping each other (I'm almost certain they can't be as indifferent to the neighbors as I did...). The problem might come from the fact that the "leaders" of those neighborhoods are not taking steps to help the members.
5. Solidarity comes from the people, not from the top. It is almost clear that the policy in Shanghai did not take into consideration of the needs of actual people, but instead the "planning"/"big picture". There should be a balance between both.

I would keep improving this project (adding more indicators, cleaning data, improve the display, etc), and there has been a lot of information my friend and I were interested in exploring. I'm really glad I have this opportunity to share the information with you, because as someone grew up in Shanghai, I really hope more people can have a vague sense of what's actually happening and what might be the reasons behind.

While China is usually depicted by Western media as an authoritarian regime (this is actually accurate) where everyone is brainwashed (not... yet) and only Beijing gets to dictate (simply not true), actual people have done so much amazing work to help each other out of it. Those work should not be ignored, because I believe hope comes from the people.

With that, thanks for reading, and I hope you get some information from my project.

Citations

Hedge, Zero. Phil's Stock World: Australia’s COVID Outbreak Worsens Despite Economy-Crippling Lockdowns. Newstex, Chatham, 2021. ProQuest, https://proxy.wm.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/blogs-podcasts-websites/phils-stock-world-australia-s-covid-outbreak/docview/2550606653/se-2?accountid=15053.

Lin, Ting-Ting et al. “COVID-19 Lockdown Increased the Risk of Preterm Birth.” Frontiers in medicine vol. 8 705943. 27 Sep. 2021, doi:10.3389/fmed.2021.705943

Shehzad, Khurram et al. “COVID-19 and Spillover Effect of Global Economic Crisis on the United States' Financial Stability.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 12 632175. 26 Feb. 2021, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.632175

Yang, Shujuan et al. “Obesity and activity patterns before and during COVID-19 lockdown among youths in China.” Clinical obesity vol. 10,6 (2020): e12416. doi:10.1111/cob.12416

Du, Junfeng et al. “Mental Health Burden in Different Professions During the Final Stage of the COVID-19 Lockdown in China: Cross-sectional Survey Study.” Journal of medical Internet research vol. 22,12 e24240. 2 Dec. 2020, doi:10.2196/24240