A lot of us in California and the rest of the country are back in crowded bars, packed inside

concerts, sharing drinks, and basically living like the pandemic is pretty much over.

But on the other side of the world in Shanghai, it's a completely different story.

That's people in Shanghai screaming and yelling from inside their lockdown apartments. The strict lockdowns and zero-tolerance COVID policies that were once praised for keeping China largely infection-free, they're back and they're now pushing people to their limits.

I'm Gustavariano. You're listening to The Times, Daily News, from the LA Times. It's Friday,

April 22nd, 2022. Today, how the recent lockdown in Shanghai is testing China's zero-tolerance strategy

and what this means for the country's communist government.

Stephanie Yang is a China correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

Stephanie, welcome to the Times.

Thank you for having me.

So China's COVID-Zero policy got a lot of attention worldwide, both because of how drastic it seemed, but also because it seemed to work.

What did that policy look like in practice?

So China's initial approach to the COVID outbreak was to implement these very, very strict

lockdown measures. And the first time that we saw that was with the initial outbreak in

Wuhan. China locked down the entire city. And at that point, it seemed really extreme.

It wasn't clear how long the lockdown in Anyang, home to 5.5 million people would last.

Mass testing is being enforced standard procedure whenever outbreaks pop up around the massive

country.

But what I was able to do is virtually wipe out local infection, and after a couple of months,

China was able to reopen within its borders and go about life as normal.

A shutdown of public gatherings and a quarantine has steadied China's caseload as the virus spreads rapidly elsewhere.

After arduous efforts, the positive momentum of China's epidemic situation

...