October 21, 2021 12:02 pm
On the sixth day of quarantine in a hotel room in Tianjin, where they took me directly from the airport, the phone call from the psychological support arrives: “Are you sleeping well? Are you eating? ”Asks a woman in a kind and thoughtful tone. I reply that I sleep and have many dreams. “Well, it means you’re happy.” Back in China from Italy after more than a year, I have to go through the “centralized quarantine”, as they call it here: two weeks in a hotel room for those arriving in the country, three weeks for those heading to Beijing, which in how much capital must be safeguarded more than other cities. The suspicion is that these “quarantine hotels” formerly languished without customers and are now one of the most joyful manifestations of the crown-business. Because obviously the whole process is at our expense, since it is we who want to return to China at any cost.
As always, mass mobilization oversees everything, that is, the dozens of employees in white overalls, masks, glasses, hands and feet in cellophane, whose sex cannot be distinguished until they speak. They pick us up at the airport, move us, lock us up, feed us, examine us, for three weeks. Diligent, caring, almost affectionate, like those who manage the Weixin chat (WeChat) where all hotel guests can publish complaints and requests and through which we receive directives and communications of various kinds.
In an interview published on March 4, 2020, Bruce Aylward, head of the World Health Organization (WHO) team who had just visited Wuhan, told the New York Times: “China is very good at keeping people alive.” I agree, they keep us alive, even psychologically, and they do it well.
The big bubble
So is life in the xinguan yiqing bihuan guanli, “Closed-circuit management of covid-19”, the device set up in China to eliminate infections. Whenever a new outbreak appears (often it is only a handful of positive cases), the risk area is isolated, all residents are swabbed, attempts are made to avoid gatherings, and couriers are prohibited from entering and so on. Each place applies different rules, based on the circumstances, but the substance does not change: a parallel world is built. While in the West it was decided to live with the virus, in China there is a tendency to zero out the infections. It seems that the majority of the population prefers this way, preferring personal security inside the big bubble over unlimited freedom, even that of infecting and becoming infected. Will it be true or just propaganda? This is probably true, especially since, except for the areas where an outbreak occurs, people live and circulate normally in China.
The “closed circuit” model is also automatically extended to those coming from outside, who these days are by definition “at risk”. After all, what can you answer to those who point out that in Italy there are still more than two thousand cases and forty deaths a day and in China instead nineteen and zero respectively (data of 13 October)? After the appearance of the delta variant, on social networks there were those who asked that the preventive isolation of the “aliens” be even more drastic.
When other evaluations, political or economic, prevail, then as if by magic the country will reopen
In Guangdong province they built a new quarantine center with five thousand rooms, each equipped with a thermometer that works with artificial intelligence and a video chat to allow continuous dialogue between inmates and guards. Human contact will be reduced to a minimum – only doctors and paramedics who will do 28-day shifts and three weeks of solitary confinement before they can go out – because the delivery of meals and everything else will be robotic. According to some, it means that Beijing will continue with its zero contagion policy and the ironic social distancing for those coming from outside for at least one or two more years.
Personally, I believe instead that when other evaluations not necessarily health, but also political or economic prevail, then as if by magic the country will reopen. Zero contagion will give way to other priorities and the future anti-contagion panopticon will find alternative uses, or it will simply be abandoned like so many cathedrals in the desert that China is dotted with. At the moment, however, it seems that eighteen other centers similar to those in Guangdong are under construction.
Less effective vaccines
My feeling is that China applies zero tolerance to the virus through mass mobilization and the “people’s war” against covid-19 because it knows itself all too well and doesn’t trust itself. The vaccines made in China they are not as effective as the Western ones – even the Chinese experts admitted it – and therefore, in addition to vaccinating as much as possible, it is necessary to create “closed circuits” when the alarm goes off.
There is talk of the possibility that the production of an mRna vaccine will start in the coming weeks. The doubts are legitimate, because as usual the state media define it “better than the Western ones” reporting the words of “experts” not better defined, while it indicates a plant in Yunnan capable of producing two hundred million doses per year. The accounts do not add up: does it mean a hundred million vaccinated? Will it take 14 years to vaccinate all Chinese? China learns fast and produces even faster, but I don’t think this news is enough to reduce the alarm, at least for now.
Recently, China’s top epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, said that two conditions are necessary for the country to reopen its borders without too many obstacles: the first is that it reaches a vaccination rate of 80-85 percent, and there more or the less we are; the second is that the incidence of the virus in other countries decreases, and there we are not yet. However, Zhong let slip, “China cannot go on like this for long.” Will he end up admitting that we have to live with the virus in some way?
Meanwhile, on September 29, the International Olympic Committee approved the health protocols decided by Beijing in view of the Winter Olympics scheduled for February. Only Chinese residents will be able to attend the races. There are rumors of quarantine periods before and / or after, but the details are not yet known. As for the athletes, the unvaccinated will have to spend 21 days in isolation before accessing the facilities and the Olympic village: how will they train? It is clear that in Xi Jinping’s Olympics there is no room for no vax.
For the vaccinated – and the appreciable novelty is that non-Chinese vaccines will also be recognized – the closed circuit is triggered: athletes, official companions, journalists, workers involved in the Olympic event will live in a sort of bubble from arrival in China to departure. They will eat, sleep, compete in a parallel world and there will be a dedicated transport system that will pick them up from their accommodations to take them to the three Olympic locations: Beijing city, Yanqing district and Zhangjiakou, in Hebei province, the one that surrounds the capital. . Everyone within the Olympic bubble will undergo daily tests.
We had already written about parallel worlds in China some time ago, quoting the dystopian tale Beijing folding by Hao Jingfiang and fearing that I have exaggerated a bit with the similarities. They look very real today. Almost normal.
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