Inside the Shanghai lockdown, with SupChina's own Chang Che
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The COVID lockdown in China's biggest city, Shanghai, hasn't been going exactly according to plan. This week on Sinica, we speak with our business editor Chang Che, who flew back to Shanghai in early March and emerged from quarantine just in time for "dynamic clearing." He gives us a first-hand look at the scramble for basic food, and offers his take on China's vaunted state capacity, the role of neighborhood committees in implementing central government policy, what went so badly wrong in Shanghai, and what lessons might be learned for the next Chinese city that sees an Omicron outbreak.
2:38 – Chang's experience of the lockdown
7:46 – The current mood in Shanghai
11:02 – Neighborhood Committees: the foot soldiers of pandemic prediction
14:00 – Explaining the relatively low rate of vaccination among the elderly in Shanghai
18:47 – The case for locking down Shanghai, and how they might have done it better
31:01 – The reputational damage to China
33:31 – Schadenfreude
41:04 – Why a state that can test 26 million in a day can't keep people fed
A transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.
Recommendations:
Chang: Tokyo Vice on HBO Max
Kaiser: The National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the cynical podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SUPChina. |
| 0:15.1 | Subscribe to SUPChina's daily, newly designed China Access newsletter to keep up of all the latest news from China from |
| 0:21.6 | hundreds of different news sources. Or check out all the original writing on our website at |
| 0:26.3 | subchina.com. We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials, great explainers and trackers, |
| 0:32.5 | regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations |
| 0:39.0 | to its ingenious entrepreneurs, |
| 0:41.3 | from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples |
| 0:44.3 | in China's Xinjiang region, |
| 0:46.3 | to China's travails as it wrestles with a surging wave of COVID-19. |
| 0:51.1 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news |
| 0:53.8 | about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 0:56.5 | We cover China with neither fear nor favor. |
| 0:59.8 | I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 1:03.7 | This show is supposed to feature former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but he had to |
| 1:07.8 | cancel last minute because he lost his voice, a lot of talking from |
| 1:11.5 | his book tour. But we will reschedule and put that out as soon as we can. Meanwhile, I reached out to |
| 1:16.9 | my colleague at Sub-China Changch-Chang in Chinese. Chong has been our business editor, but has |
| 1:23.2 | been shifting his focus to do more editing and to work on feature writing, which he's excellent |
| 1:29.0 | at if he hasn't seen some of his work. He was recently published in the New Yorker, in fact. |
| 1:33.3 | After spending the holidays here in the U.S., he decided, what was it, in late February, |
| 1:37.3 | Chong, to fly back to China? |
| 1:39.6 | Yep, early March. |
... |
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