WUHAN, China (AP) – A year after the closure, Wuhan has long since returned to life, but Zhu Tao is still stuffed into his 14th-floor apartment, spending his days losing the news, playing virtual football at his PlayStation and feeling that China is hesitant on the verge of collapse.
He blew thousands of dollars, saved lives, piled up chocolate and beef bars, water bottles and sacks of rice, masks, alcohol wipes and disinfectants, and a $ 900 solar panel.
Chasing Zhu is afraid that the virus may return: that once again, the government will hide the truth and, once again, Wuhan will fall closed.
“I’m in a state to eat and wait for death, eat and wait for death,” Zhu said, with a trendy cut that was trimmed as he didn’t dare venture into the barber shop. “People like me may be in the minority, but I take it very seriously.”
Zhu, a 44-year-old foundry in the city’s steel and steel mills, is well off China’s mainstream. He is a harsh critic of the government, an intermittent protester and supporter of the Hong Kong democratic movement.
He and other people willing to publicly express these opinions are ridiculed, fired, or silenced. They are a minority in an increasingly authoritarian and prosperous China, where there is less tolerance for protest and less desire to do so.
At the start of the Wuhan outbreak, which would later spread around the world and kill more than 2 million people, Zhu ignored reports from state media minimizing the virus and staying home, a move that may have saved him. , to his wife and son of the infection.
For a few fleeting months, while public anger erupted against the authorities who hid critical information about the coronavirus, Zhu felt his early precaution was justified and his deep suspicion of officials was vindicated.
But as the winter got wet in the spring and the Wuhan closure lifted, the mood changed.. Now, Wuhan’s wealthy kids drop expensive bottles of whiskey and bop into the electronics falling into the city’s nightclubs. Thousands of people stretch along Jianghan Road, the city’s main shopping street.
Once seen as a prophet, Zhu has now become an outcast, his anti-state sentiment increasingly at odds with government orthodoxy. He has alienated his in-laws and neighbors and has been arrested, subjected to surveillance and censored.
Preparing for another wave of infection, he wonders how it is possible for everyone around him to keep life as usual.
“This is the biggest historical event of the last century,” Zhu said. “But everyone has returned to their lives, as before the epidemic. … How can they be so asleep, so indifferent, as if they had barely experienced anything? ”
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Zhu grew up in the 1980s, a time politically open to China, when teachers sometimes touched on concepts such as democracy and freedom of speech after the disastrous tumult of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
It suits Zhu, given his “very naughty, very rebellious” self-description and his intellectual instincts, which is reflected in the way his language translates into literary references even though he has never been to college.
He was just a child during the 1989 Tiananmen protests, when hundreds of thousands marched in Beijing’s central square to demand democratic rights. But in the years following the bloody military crackdown on protesters, he read more about them, feeling sympathetic even as others became cynical, indifferent, or even supported the Communist Party government, won by the Communist Party. China’s growing prosperity.
When Zhu went online more than a decade ago, he discovered that others shared his way of thinking. China had not yet developed the sophisticated Internet police force that patrols the web today, and uncensored news about the government constantly erupted online.
The first controversy that caught Zhu’s attention was a scandal over contaminated milk powder that killed six babies and made tens of thousands more sick. He joined chat groups and meetings and slowly slipped into dissident circles.
After President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, came to power, Zhu’s views brought him more and more trouble. In 2014, he was arrested a month after putting on a black shirt and a white flower in Wuhan Square in memory of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, taking him away from his teenage son.
But when a mysterious respiratory illness began spreading through Wuhan early last year, Zhu’s deep skepticism about the government suddenly proved accurate. After seeing rumors about the disease in late December 2019, Zhu began warning friends and family. Many detached him like a stubborn fly, but his wife and son stayed home, saving them from exits that could soon strengthen relatives.
The first to fall ill was his wife’s aunt, who began coughing after an appointment with an ophthalmologist at a hospital where the virus was spreading. Next was his wife’s cousin, who had accompanied her to the same hospital. Then she was the mother of her neighbor.
Then came the blockade, proclaimed without notice on January 23 at 2 p.m. Wuhan came across history books, the epicenter of the largest quarantine in history. The virus devastated the city with 11 million, flooding hospitals and killing thousands, including his wife’s aunt on Jan. 24.
Zhu had a sad satisfaction in proving himself right. He saw on social media the explosion of public rage, which reached fever in February with the death of Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor who was punished for warning other people of the same disease that would claim his life.
That night, Zhu got hooked on his phone, scrolling through hundreds of posts denouncing censorship. There were labels that demanded freedom of speech. There was a quote from Li in a Chinese magazine shortly before he died: “A healthy society should not have a single voice.”
Early the next morning, many of the sites had been cleared by censors. On his wife’s cousin’s death certificate, doctors wrote that he died of an ordinary lung infection, even though he had tested positive for coronavirus. This deepened Zhu’s suspicions that the cases were being seriously underwritten.
“I was so angry that it hurt me,” he said. “I had nowhere to divert my emotions. You want to kill someone, you’re so angry, you know? ”
The outbreak strained Zhu’s relationships. Her neighbor, a childhood friend, quarreled with Zhu after doctors told her mother she only had a regular lung infection.
“I questioned him. “How can you be sure that what the hospital told you was the truth?” Zhu recalled. “I said you should still be careful.”
A week later, his friend’s mother died. On his death certificate, the coronavirus was given as the cause. They argued the day he died, with Zhu’s friend accusing him of cursing his mother. The two have not spoken since.
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In April, the blockade was lifted after 76 days. But as others returned to work, Zhu sought medical leave for a year and shut down. His quarantine has lasted almost 400 days.
That summer he refused to go to the funerals of his cousin and his aunt that summer, although there were no longer any new cases in Wuhan. His angry mothers-in-law cut off contact.
The pockets of people with similar ideas still dot China, from renegade intellectuals in Beijing to a punk cafe in Inner Mongolia, where posters and stickers were called “preventable and controllable,” – quietly mocking the boiler phrase that officers used to minimize the virus.
In Wuhan, circles of dissidents gather in encrypted chats to change intelligence. In small tea meetings, they worry about the party’s inconsistencies with a touch of pride, saying they were saved from the virus by not trusting the government.
But under the watchful eye of state chambers and censors, there is little room to organize or connect. Before the anniversary of this year’s closure, police fired at least one dissident out of Wuhan. It was bei luyou, or “touristy,” the playful phrase used by activists to describe how police take holiday problems on involuntary vacations at sensitive times.
In his self-quarantine, Zhu has found solace in literature. He is attracted to Soviet writers who mocked Moscow’s vast propaganda apparatus. He is also convinced that the virus could spread widely, although the official count of cases in China is now much lower than in most other countries.
“They’ve been lying for so long,” Zhu said, “so long that even if they started telling me the truth, I don’t believe it.”
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Associated Press video journalist Emily Wang and photographer Ng Han Guan contributed to this report.