Letter from Shanghai

(2022)

I’m writing this in the empty lanehouse apartment in the former French Concession that has been my home since I moved to Shanghai just over three years ago. The words will not come easy. Before moving here, I had lived, at various times, in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and London, and spent extended periods of time in many more cities. Like all those cities, this, Shanghai, is a place I used to love. But like most things around here, it wasn’t built to last. This morning, the movers came and took all my things away. Tomorrow I will leave this country. I could have never anticipated it ending this way. I will probably never return.

            A dramatic statement for sure, and not one I’ve ever uttered about any of the other places I’ve lived in or visited. Before I arrived here three years ago to take up a teaching job at a university, I had been a frequent Shanghai visitor for nearly a decade. Like many, I was drawn to its pulsations and its contradictions: a jarring, at-times overwhelming East Asian megalopolis of some twenty-five million inhabitants, with an airy urban planning and hodgepodge of otherworldly European architectural styles demarcating its center; the not-capital-yet-largest-city of a markedly authoritarian country that seemed, at every moment, to willfully distance itself from its politics; a reputedly superficial place obsessed with fashion and finance, yet simultaneously home to some of the outermost fringes of the avant-garde in music and art; a city where playfulness, decadence, a disdain for the infringements of law in its oppressive modalities, even a certain anarchy were given free rein. Since then, I’ve watched the situation swiftly devolve from a state of quotidian life that at least implied a certain stagnant normality to a condition of totalitarian unlivability not even Orwell could have prophesied, and that has led certain bold domestic critics to refer sardonically to Xi Jinping’s China as “West Korea.” It is no longer just the capital, Beijing, that has been suffocated by these policies – let alone, in a much more dramatic way, Hong Kong, formerly the most open and cosmopolitan city in the Chinese-speaking world; now, the life force that once animated Shanghai, the mainland’s favored city, has also been extinguished.

            If we are looking for a convenient phrase to sum up the current state of affairs, we might begin with Xi’s summation of the country’s supposed response to a public health crisis: the “zero-Covid strategy,” whereby, since China closed its borders in early 2020, the entire bureaucracy and police apparatus have been mobilized so as to prevent a single case of Covid-19 from intruding. One would have supposed that the policy would have been revised when the highly contagious yet essentially harmless Omicron variant began to spread in the early months of this year – just as 2022 has seen virtually every other country in the region and the larger world relax its measures in response to a variant that is largely asymptomatic and only rarely results in serious illness. But China is not a normal country, nor is Xi your typical leader with at least vague pretensions of respecting science and consensual notions of what constitutes reason and sanity; he is rather a weak, vulnerable, and insecure dictator whose delusions of grandeur led him, early on in his rise, to eliminate all of his political enemies (and none of his equally corrupt high-powered supporters) via an “anti-corruption campaign” that was deliberately constructed so as to win him admiration from the toiling masses. This was followed in 2018 by a revision of the constitution that did away with term limits for the country’s presidency, effectively reverting the country back to the pre-modern era in enabling Xi to become emperor for life.