Beijing Begins Locking Down Schools, Businesses, Residential Districts

The shadow of a Shanghai-style coronavirus lockdown loomed even larger over China’s capital city Beijing on Friday, as health officials began shutting down businesses, quarantining residential compounds, and closing schools indefinitely.

Beijing’s third round of mass coronavirus testing is scheduled for Friday, but city officials did not wait for the results before ordering all schools closed indefinitely. 

The announcement did not include any provisions for remote learning, or how students might be able to complete vital upcoming exams, which suggests the decision was either made in panic or kept quiet for as long as possible to avoid triggering a mass exodus from Beijing.

Chinese coronavirus data should always be viewed with deep skepticism, but Beijing currently claims a total of 150 infections in the current omicron wave, with roughly a third of them traced to outbreak clusters in schools in the Chaoyang district.

Two housing compounds in Chaoyang were effectively locked down Tuesday, with residents ordered to remain in their homes. Signs appeared outside the compounds reading “Entry Only, No Exit.”

Beijing suspended weddings and funerals on Thursday, the UK Guardian reported.

Foreign visitors to Beijing reported being herded into “quarantine hotels” or sealed in their own residences with electronic alarms. Businesses and public accommodations, from gymnasiums to movie theaters and shopping malls, were shuttered Friday. People who recently spent time in such businesses began receiving creepy text messages, such as this example quoted by Reuters on Friday:

Hello citizens! You have recently visited the beef noodles & braised chicken shop in Guanghui Li community. Please report to your compound or hotel immediately, stay put and wait for the notification of nucleic acid testing. If you violate the above requirements and cause the epidemic to spread, you will bear legal responsibility.

Beijing officials are keeping the results of mass coronavirus testing secret for as long as possible while they reassure the public that a brutal Shanghai-type lockdown will not be imposed on the capital, France24 noted Thursday. Some of that reassurance is being delivered through loudspeakers in grocery stores that literally tell shoppers they have no reason to fear food shortages like those in Shanghai.

“The country’s government is also not keen to hear about a possible total lockdown of the capital. It is not clear that the country – or even the world – could afford it after over two years of restrictions,” France24 wrote, while pointing out that the restrictions and shutdowns announced on Thursday and Friday could be seen as locking the city down slowly to avoid public fear and outrage.

Locking Beijing down like Shanghai could unleash absolute terror on other Chinese cities, drive away foreign investors, and ruin China’s hopes of reaching its 2022 growth targets. It would be a huge embarrassment for the Chinese Communist Party ahead of its upcoming 20th Congress, especially since the people of the imperial capital city have been taught to look down their noses at Shanghai, an attitude explained by the Diplomat on Wednesday:

Many of Beijing’s residents have a measure of disdain for Shanghai, the country’s more Western-oriented commercial hub. The Shanghainese are “unreasonable troublemakers”; their officials deserve blame for not locking down fast enough, says a typical resident of the capital. Censorship and propaganda have helped shape such feelings. Shanghai’s suffering is glossed over in news reports. Angry outbursts by the city’s residents on social media are quickly erased by state censors.

Officials in Beijing seem to regard Shanghai as a rare exception to their zero-covid success story—China has had a lower death rate from the virus than any big country and stronger economic growth. It is certainly not taken as a lesson that the policy needs to change. Rather, officials in Shanghai are chided for being too loose and moving too slowly. The central government has pushed for more testing and stricter lockdowns. Many residents recently found green fences outside their compounds, to seal them in.

This political illusion would become difficult to sustain if Beijing ends up in the same lockdown hell as Shanghai, and it would be even more embarrassing for the Communist Party if the imprisoned people of Beijing grew as restless and resentful as Shanghai has become.

Shanghai’s captives have taken to leaning from their windows and banging pots and pans to signal their displeasure with “dynamic zero-Covid” lockdown policy. That would make for quite a scene in Beijing.