As I see it | Shanghai’s Covid-19 crisis is no Chernobyl moment but China must change from zero tolerance
- The central government moved past the outrage from the death of whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang
- Now anger is boiling up in Shanghai over food shortages and rising cases
The public outrage over Li’s death seemed to herald a reckoning on a par with that over the nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union.
But months later, after containing the Wuhan outbreak, surveys showed that public support for the Chinese government had grown.
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Police in Shanghai scuffle with residents over Covid-19 quarantine measures
In the two years since, the government hailed the country’s low case numbers as a show of the superiority of China’s political system.
Mobilising the entire nation’s resources to achieve a goal demonstrated the system’s advantage over Western democracies, it argued in a message that was well received by the Chinese public.
Officials there told residents it would take four days to screen everybody on each side of the Huangpu River for the Omicron variant. They thought it would not take long to find all the cases, given Omicron’s shorter incubation period.
