Briton spent 10 days in a secret covid 'prison' in China and told how it was

Correspondent Financial Times in Shanghai told how he spent 10 days in a secret Chinese detention center for contacts with those infected with coronavirus, as well as what he learned when he was taken to an isolation room on the island. Further - from the first person.

Photo: IStock

The call was from a number I didn't know.

“You need quarantine,” the man on the other end of the line said in Mandarin Chinese. He called from the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “I will come and pick you up in four or five hours.”

I rushed out of the hotel to stock up needed. On the advice of colleagues and my previous quarantine experience in China, I purchased: canned tuna, tea, biscuits, three types of vitamins, four varieties of Haribo sweets, Tupperware, yoga mat, towel, cleaning products, extension cord, a large number of books, eye drops, tray , mug and coaster depicting the countryside surrounding Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire.

After the promised time, they called me again. This time it was a woman from the hotel staff. “You are a close contact of one of the patients,” she said. You can't go outside."

"Am I the only close contact with the patient in the hotel?" I asked.

She said that I was the only one and added that "the hotel is closed", that is, locked. I went to the door of my room and opened it. There was an employee there. We both jumped.

"You can't go outside," she told me.

"Can employees go out?" I asked apologetically.

"It's OK. I just started my shift,” she replied smiling.

A little later, people in protective suits arrived. First, they ran a PCR test with the same hurried tiredness as the person who called me earlier. Then one of them led me down a deserted corridor. We passed the elevators, which were blocked and guarded, and took the service elevator. Outside, the entrance was also cordoned off. For me alone, a hotel with hundreds of rooms is frozen. I was “taken away,” as the process is usually called in China these days.

There was a bus in the empty street. It was a small car for school trips or large families. We left.

"Are we going to another hotel?" I asked one of the dozen or so passengers.

“This is not a hotel,” he replied.

"Tian a," another passenger said. This expression, often translated as "Oh my God," in this case, it rather meant "for heaven's sake."

The mood on the bus was not so much frightened as detached. The pop music coming from the radio was interrupted from time to time.

It's a curious experience when you, as an adult, are being driven somewhere, and you have no idea about the destination. Our driver, wrapped in a hazmat suit, was talking frantically on the phone. After about an hour, his driving seemed to become more jittery as well, and I was reminded of recent news reports from Guizhou province where a quarantine transport bus crashed, killing 27 passengers. I fastened my seatbelt and moved the suitcase that was blocking the passage.

Soon we stopped on a small road in the middle of a field. The driver was told by radio to continue driving. But this was impossible, because there were several full-size wagons in front of us, and crowds of people wandered around in the dark.

“I won’t go,” he barked into the phone, got out, locked the bus behind him and left.

I rolled down the window, just to see if I could get out. We were already far away in the countryside, and it was surprisingly cold. The passenger, who was also wearing a hazmat suit (it was difficult to tell who was in charge because of the hazmat suits), then jumped into the driver's seat. He didn't try to escape, he just unlocked the door. Outside, people were smoking and loitering aimlessly.

"Where are you from?" one of the others asked me. His protective gear was folded around his waist like a jumpsuit.

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“Great Britain,” I said, and his eyes widened, “They brought you here? With a foreign passport?

The line of buses slowly dissolved into what looked like a brightly lit gate at the end of the road. Cigarette smoke in the night air cast a silvery veil over the fields. There was a feeling of some huge structure behind the darkness. The placement of suitcases and bags inside the bus meant that we were all somewhat uncomfortable, although one person fell asleep and snored loudly. Another was playing solitaire on his phone. We waited. None of us — not me, not the other passengers, not our driver — have tested positive for COVID-19.

Around 02:00 our driver got back on board. The engine roared and the radio crackled to life. It was our turn. We delved into China's quarantine apparatus - a place that finds you, not the other way around. It is a part of the system that the outside world hardly represents or understands. This is a system that seeks to destroy, not coexist with, the coronavirus. And it's a place that foreigners might imagine, but where few have ever actually been.

History in brief

Three weeks earlier, China Eastern Airlines' check-in line at Heathrow Airport was cordoned off, isolating passengers from their surroundings.

“Now is not the best time to enter China,” one of the employees told me just before I crossed the point of no return.

“It is easier to climb into heaven than to leave the country,” was sometimes said of the restrictions that were in place in communist China until the 1990s. Today it is "easier to ascend to heaven than to return." Technically, my story began in early 2020, when I was appointed as the FT's Shanghai Correspondent.

The next two years, unable to move to the mainland due to a severe visa delay, I spent waiting in Hong Kong. After a 12 hour flight, I arrived at Shanghai airport. Before entering the city, I had to go through a mandatory 10-day quarantine, which was waiting for everyone who did not yet have a home.

PCR testing in China is an almost daily ritual, and testing booths are located on many streets. They vaguely resemble grocery stores, except that they are larger and shaped like a cube, and the worker inside sits behind plexiglass with two hand holes.

After completing my first quarantine, I moved into a hotel in the city center while I was looking for an apartment. But in my first few days at liberty, my QR code wasn't properly scanned when entering buildings. Someone somewhere wrote my name Tnomab (instead of Thomas). (The "n" is next to the "h" on a QWERTY keyboard, which explains the first typo. The "b" was a mystery.) Until I could fix it, I had to negotiate to get anywhere.

Otherwise, life in Shanghai seemed remarkably normal. The city's glittering shopping malls were well stocked. One evening I ventured into a bar on Nanjing Road, which was difficult to get into. One person told me that he estimated that 90% of Chinese agree with the government's approach.

This approach, known as zero Covid, is to suppress the virus as much as possible. It uses contact tracing, continuous testing, quarantine and lockdown to stop community transmission of the virus as soon as a case is discovered. It is aggressive and can only really exist in the long term in an authoritarian society with pre-existing mass surveillance mechanisms. There is no end to this policy, although the vaccination rate in China is about 90%. Communist Party officials point to the country's large elderly population, its uneven regional development and lack of medical resources. This is, above all, a different kind of bureaucracy, behind which is a huge workforce.

A few days later I received the first phone call.

“Is this Tnomab? the man asked. It took a long time to interpret this word, which is not found in either English or Chinese. There was a positive case in the bar. You were there?"

Perhaps it would have been better to deny that I was Tnomab, but Tnomab and I shared the same passport number. I didn't need to be quarantined, the man said, but I should lay low. The odds weren't very good given that only 18 cases were found in Shanghai that day. Moreover, it is unclear whether the infection occurred on the evening I was there. The next day the authorities called me again to tell me they were on their way. I tried to negotiate, but it was useless.

Arrival

When the bus finally arrived at its destination many hours later, we quietly disembarked. Each of us was asked to confirm our presence on a “list of names,” a bureaucratic concept as ancient as the QR code is modern. The only letters of the alphabet in a sea of ​​Chinese characters: Tnomab William Hale.

Each of us was assigned a room number. Another arrival, whom I will call Resident 1, was walking beside me. He pointed to the three rows of wires above the blue fences that marked the perimeter—not quite barbed wire, but almost. He shook his head, laughing slightly, and for a moment, in the midst of my weariness, I felt a pleasant sense of camaraderie.

The sight of our room made us wake up. The facility consisted of neat rows of what might be called cabins, each a box like a shipping container, standing on short piles above the ground.

A large, smiling animal was painted on the side of some of the rows, like a mural on a makeshift school built after a natural disaster. It was difficult to say how many cabins there were. Fluorescent lighting flickered outside and the camera was set to see every door.

Like the detainees, the staff of the facility were not allowed to leave their homes or receive packages, and they worked long hours.

Most of us hung in doorways, taking in our new surroundings.

“There is no hot water,” someone shouted. Somewhere a woman was crying, and it occurred to me that there were no children here.

"She has no food," Resident 1 explained. A worker in a hazmat suit came to hand out instant noodles.

The facility had 10 corridors, each containing about 26 rooms.

My 196-square-foot cabin had two single beds, a kettle, air conditioning, a desk, a chair, a bowl, two small rags, one bar of soap, an unopened blanket, a small pillow, a toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste, and a rolled-up mattress about the thickness of an oven glove.

The floor was covered with dust and dirt. When you walked, everything shook, which I soon stopped noticing. The window was barred, but it was still possible to lean out. There was no soul. When I checked the internet connection, it was several times faster than the internet in my Shanghai hotel.

"I've seen videos like this," one resident later said, referring to footage of similar mass-quarantined objects that was circulated on Douyin, China's TikTok. But I noticed that reality is still difficult to accept. I saw them too and before coming to China I wondered if it was possible to find one of these places. Now I wanted to get out. I approached an employee in a hazmat suit and explained that I was a foreign journalist, in the hope that this would lead to my release.

"What do you mean?" the woman asked. Not only was my accent embarrassing her, but the premise of my question didn't make sense here.

There are several types of quarantine in China. There is a quarantine for arrivals, in hotels, which I just completed. Quarantine at home, often as a result of citywide lockdowns. There is quarantine for COVID-19 patients or hospital quarantine. Finally, there is quarantine for close contacts. Many names have been coined to refer to those who have been in close contact with the infected, or mijie as they are called. Cimijie is a close contact of a close contact. Shikongbansuizhe is a close contact based on more flexible definitions of space and time. Jokingly asked a colleague how to say "close contact close contact close contact."

“Yibanjiechuzhe,” I heard in response.

I was mijie. My phone told me that I was on an island north of Shanghai. On the first morning I asked the staff if anyone knew the full address of the institution. Nobody was sure of this. It turned out that they, too, had just arrived. All questions were directed to the customer support phone number. But we weren't really customers as everything was free.

In the light of day, I saw that the room was clearly divided into two groups of people. The personnel were in protective suits, the rest were exclusively in civilian clothes. The staff could go outside, but we could not. Workers in white hazmat suits are called "da bai" in China.

One young man, whom I will call Worker 1, said he knew our location only as "P7". The facility had just been built, he added, and I was the only foreigner here. Articles published in Chinese media in May reported that a facility called P7 was built five kilometers from another, P5. It is not clear how many such facilities exist in China.

At first it was impossible to make out who was who among the staff. In the end, through protective suits, masks and goggles, personality traits appeared, timbre and gait appeared.

Worker 1, or so I thought, sang old songs as he handed out food.

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The daily rhythm was as follows. We woke up early in the morning to what looked like a lawn mower, which was actually an industrial grade sanitizer spraying our windows and steps. Meals were organized at 8:00, 12:00 and 17:00. Around 09:00, two nurses in blue hazmat suits arrived to perform PCR tests. One day I asked if they would transfer me somewhere else if I tested positive. "Of course they'll take you!" one of the nurses said.

I followed a strict personal routine: language learning, work, lunch, work, push-ups, playlists from the band Future Islands, online chess, reading or watching episodes of The Boys on Amazon Prime, in that order. This was interspersed with constant cleaning to keep dust out. My faith in the power of routine was strengthened when I noticed that the other tenants had stopped cleaning up their breakfast, leaving it on the steps outside. Sound traveled easily between cabins and I could hear people walking around at night. I'm lucky. At least my job was to watch what was happening and not just survive.

The bed was made of an iron frame and six planks of wood, and the mattress was so thin that you had to lie perfectly flat. Meanwhile, it was impossible to lean against the bed frame. It reminded me of Roald Dahl's Matilda, a book I hadn't thought about since I was about nine years old. In it, the headmistress locks naughty children in a room in which they cannot get comfortable. I soon realized that if you wrap the blanket around the frame, you get a back.

Any discomfort was secondary to the psychological impact of uncertainty. Although I was told on arrival that I would be staying for seven days, it was actually 10. Customer service informed me through various lengthy discussions that the "list of names" of those being sent home was published daily and not available in advance. After a while, all my other problems melted away and I only thought about getting out.

Although we were supposed to stay in our rooms, we were sometimes able to go outside briefly and, before the camera raised an alarm, exchange information and sometimes goods with other residents. These moments were the best hope for at least some clarity. One day this led to a miracle - I got instant coffee. On the other hand, Resident-1 suggested that the rooms were only half built and that we were rushed into them because the quarantine hotels were overcrowded.

The institution was surrounded by tall trees, and in the late afternoon, when the sun set through them, you could open the window and let in the light. One day, around this time, I got into a conversation with three employees who often gathered to chat within reach of my porch. Their perception of the place where we were imprisoned and where they worked long hours was radically different from mine. It's good here, they said. You have your own computer.

“Chinese cities of the first and second levels, as well as cities of the third, fourth and fifth levels, cities of high income, middle and lower levels are parallel worlds,” Resident-1 later told me.

My conversation with the three women continued. Their feeling that what was happening on the P7 was normal seemed oddly convincing. As if bureaucracy, not a virus, was a natural phenomenon that thrived in the space between people, not within them. Perhaps I underestimated everything. It didn't feel like a prison at all.

"Are you afraid of COVID-19?" I asked.

“Yes,” they replied. “If you test positive, it’s very difficult to find a job.”

In order for your name to be on the list that allows you to leave, you need to be on the so-called “double test” list. The nurses will take a sample from your nose and mouth and then do the same from the other nostril. I actively lobbied for my place on this list, but nothing could be confirmed.

When the nurses arrived, they checked the floor, my bag, my mobile phone and the air conditioner remote control. All of them, as well as the previous dozen tests that I had done in the previous two weeks, were negative. In the end, they gave me the green light.

As my departure approached, I put on my shoes for the first time in a long time. They were made from leather. Local news reported that another facility was being built near Shanghai, this time for people who did have COVID-19.

Before boarding the bus, I was given a certificate. It's like I, Tnomab William Hale, just passed my exam. The bus was packed. There was no radio; everyone turned on the music loudly on their phones, which was soon drowned out by the airflow from the open windows. I thought the journey would end with the spectacular return of the city's skyscrapers. But I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I hardly noticed them.

When I got back to my hotel, the hot water was hot and the mattress was soft. The number on the scale in the bathroom was lower. For a while I paced up and down the street trying to decide what to do. Passing by crowds of people in bars and restaurants, I thought: you need to be crazy to take the risks of freedom so lightly. They lived in a parallel world.

I went to a steak restaurant and asked if I needed to provide a code to order takeout. When the answer was “no,” I felt a huge sense of relief.

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