- An NYU professor says his family is becoming “hunter-collectors” amid Shanghai’s total lockdown.
- Rodrigo Zeidan said his family joined forces with the community at their estate to secure food.
- He called the city’s lockdown – and the family having to find ways to survive – an “interesting sociological experience”.
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An NYU professor living in Shanghai said his family is turning into “hunter-gatherers” as he tries to survive the city’s total COVID-19 lockdown without starving.
“Access (to food) is the problem. In a way, we’ve become hunter-gatherers,” NYU-Shanghai professor Rodrigo Zeidan said in an April 11 interview with The Hill. “We had to find ways to get food – and we don’t speak Chinese.”
He added that his family managed to secure groceries by teaming up with some people from their estate’s community to “buy as much as possible of whatever we could get our hands on,” and trade with neighbors to get more items they needed.
“It’s an interesting sociological experience to come to a city that isn’t our home country and try to survive in a very flexible way,” said Zeidan.
Zeidan told The Hill that the ongoing lockdown has surprised him and many Shanghai residents.
“Life went on as normal as it could be under the circumstances, then everything changed,” he said. “We didn’t have time to prepare and four days turned into five, six and then seven. And that is the situation we are in right now.”
He said the Western view that Chinese citizens are not protesting is wrong, saying there is immense frustration on the ground.
“This is how people in China express their concerns. They’re not protesting the central government, of course, but that’s how you keep local politicians in check,” he said, referring to videos he’d seen of Shanghainese arguing with healthcare workers uploaded to Chinese social media and then were censored.
“The protests you are seeing are an integral part of how the Chinese people are bringing accountability into their political system – as much as possible as this is not a democracy,” Zeidan said.
Shanghai went into full lockdown on April 5 to quell rising COVID-19 numbers under its COVID-zero policy. However, since the lockdown began, the city has seen discontent among its 26 million residents.
Videos have emerged of unattended infants left crying in quarantine centers after being forcibly separated from their parents, a policy the city government has defended. And social media has also been posting shocking videos of what appear to be Shanghai residents screaming from their windows as the lockdown continues.
Shanghai recorded 22,342 COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, bringing the city’s total number of infections to around 227,000 since March 1.