A NYU professor living in Shanghai said his family is turning into “hunter-gatherers” as he tries to survive the absolute lockdown of the city COVID-19 without starving. “Access (to food) is the problem. In a way, we have become hunter-gatherers,” NYU-Shanghai professor Rodrigo Zeidan said in an April 11 interview with The Hill. “We had to find ways to manage how to get food – and we do not speak Chinese.” He added that his family managed to secure food by gathering some people from their estate community to “go and buy as much as we could” and exchange with neighbors to get more items they needed. “It is an interesting sociological experience, coming to a city where it is not our homeland and trying to survive in a very flexible way,” Zeydan said. Zeidan told The Hill that the prolonged lockdown took him and many Shanghai residents by surprise. “Life went on, as normal as it could be, under these conditions, then everything changed,” he said. “We did not have time to prepare and the four days became five, six and then seven. And that is the situation we are in at the moment.” He said the western view that Chinese citizens did not protest was wrong and said there was huge frustration on the ground.
“This is how people express their concerns in China. They are not protesting against the central government, of course, but it is the way you keep local politicians in check,” he said, referring to a video he saw of Shanghai residents disagreeing with health officials. care workers who uploaded to Chinese social media and were then censored. “The protests you see are part of the way the Chinese people are doing to take some responsibility for their political system – as much as they can, as it is not a democracy,” Zeidan said. Shanghai went into full lockdown on April 5 to quell rising COVID-19 numbers, in line with its COVID-zero policy. Since the lockdown began, however, the city has seen discontent among its 26 million inhabitants. Videos of unattended babies being left crying in quarantine centers after being forcibly separated from their parents have emerged, a policy advocated by the city government. Shocking videos have also been posted on social media showing Shanghai residents screaming from their windows as the lockdown ends. Shanghai recorded 22,342 COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, bringing the total number of cases in the city to about 227,000 as of March 1.