China’s Covid-Zero Lockdown in Xinjiang Has Just Hit 100 Days

Bloomberg News
·6 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- It’s China’s longest pandemic lockdown, and probably its least well-known. But residents in the country’s dry and mountainous far west have just marked 100 days of living under some of the toughest, and most strictly enforced, Covid Zero measures in the world.

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Urumqi, the capital of the sprawling Xinjiang region, imposed its first major lockdown measures on Aug. 10. Despite initial success in bringing a flareup back to single digits, an uptick in cases at the end of September prompted the entire region -- roughly the same size as Alaska -- to halt travel services early last month, essentially sealing itself off from the rest of China to contain virus spread.

“Most people wouldn’t have imagined the lockdown could continue for this long,” said a 21-year-old university student who spent months sealed in his home in the city of Yining, near the border with Kazakhstan, and has now spent nine days in a quarantine center before being allowed to leave the city. He asked not to be identified because discussions about Xinjiang and his ethnic group are sensitive.

Read more: China’s Most Locked-Down City Shows Perils of Endless Covid Zero

The aggressive moves haven’t quelled rising daily case numbers, which hit more than 800 this week. But the marathon lockdown now clashes with an overhaul of China’s pandemic response to balance stamping out the virus with minimizing hardships on residents. Major cities are using more targeted measures even with thousands of new infections each day, avoiding city-wide lockdowns and reining in mass testing.

In Xinjiang, there aren’t yet similar shifts. Its size, remoteness and lack of economic and political sway mean officials are leaning on the harshest of policies to prevent their health-care system from being overwhelmed. With optimism building that President Xi Jinping is softening China’s pandemic response, the region’s continued outlier status underscores the challenging and uneven path the world’s second-biggest economy faces as it contemplates a Covid Zero exit.

Even within Xinjiang, easing prospects vary from place to place. Urumqi remains under lockdown, along with most of the rest of the region, while Yining just lifted its months-long shutdown on Wednesday morning.

“They can only take such simplified and brutal measures,” said Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “The lack of financial and bureaucratic capacity at municipal levels also means there aren’t enough supporting measures when implementing the lockdowns. The discrepancy between policy objectives and actual capability is huge. Covid Zero is much less effective in undeveloped places, and could bring larger humanitarian loss.”

Crackdown

Many cities in China have dealt with harsh lockdowns during the pandemic. Shanghai residents struggled to get food and medicine, Tibet’s capital of Lhasa reported a series of suicides, and people in Xi’an reported miscarriages and deaths after hospitals denied care.

But Xinjiang’s experience stands out for authorities’ exceptionally tight control over its 26 million residents, more than half of whom are from ethnic minorities, chiefly Uyghurs who have been at the center of a long-running crackdown that the United Nations has said may amount to crimes against humanity. Officials have utilized the web of surveillance, arbitrary detention and repressive policies put in place by Beijing before the pandemic -- for what the government says is a fight against terrorism and religious extremism -- to apply Covid Zero measures.

The Xinjiang government didn’t immediately respond to a fax seeking comment on the region’s Covid measures. At a briefing earlier this week, local officials said multiple areas face heightened risk of a virus resurgence, and authorities have vowed to implement the optimized virus policies issued by the central government.

“The political imperative for Covid Zero measures is enhanced in Xinjiang by the extreme securitization of the region,” said Michael Clarke, a senior fellow at the Australian Defence College’s Centre for Defence Research, who researches Xinjiang. A major theme of Xi’s leadership has been to emphasize that the region is part of China, and there’ll be no ‘coddling’ in the name of ensuring ethnic minorities stay quiescent, he said.

That’s made publicizing Xinjiang’s lockdown difficulties a risky endeavor. Awareness across the rest of China that the region has been under such a long lockdown is low, while police have clamped down on attempts to bring attention to the crisis. Authorities are investigating three people for disrupting public order after they posted comments during official livestreams, including one person who typed “Urumqi” during a State Council broadcast.

“Any issue related to Xinjiang is categorized as ‘sensitive’ in China, which has led to the strict censorship on everything people post or media coverage,” said the university student from Yining, who was in Shanghai for the financial hub’s lockdown in April and May. “Most people have forgotten about Xinjiang already.”

What manages to trickle through China’s censors shows dire conditions and fueled rare solidarity between Uyghurs and ethnic Han who make up more than 90% of the country’s total 1.4 billion population.

A recent video circulating online, which couldn’t be verified by Bloomberg News, allegedly shows people trying to leave Xinjiang by walking through the desert. Authorities in Xinjiang have previously said they’d take action to facilitate people wanting to leave, while also helping migrant workers stranded by the lockdown. Another video, which also couldn’t be verified, showed PPE-clad authorities strictly enforcing travel curbs.

Conditions inside quarantine centers are grim. The student, who is staying in a facility before he returns to Shanghai for his studies, estimates his location can house 3,000 people and is in the “wilderness of Xinjiang.” The beds are stiff and mice constantly visit through a crack in the corner, he said.

A Uyghur woman living in the US, who asked not to be identified to protect the privacy of her family in Urumqi, has been checking in on her parents from afar. When she told her father that she was sorry about what he’d had to endure, he told her things were nonetheless “way better” than 2017 -- the time he was taken to a detention camp. A 2019 UN assessment said an estimated 1 million people have been detained.

No Visitors

There’s at least one sign that travel difficulties may improve as China removes a prohibition on cross-provincial tours from high-risk areas.

But it’s not certain how, or when, officials on the ground will implement directives from the government and, for now, visiting Xinjiang is difficult. Among the country’s 27 biggest airports, Urumqi had the second-fewest completed flights on Nov. 16, at just 4.42%, according to data provider Variflight.

It’s also unclear what measures authorities could roll out to handle an inevitable surge in infections should they lift all lockdowns given the region, like many other remote parts of the country, remains under-resourced.

“I’m suffering from fear and under grave pressure,” said the university student. “I can’t sleep or eat well, or concentrate on anything for a long period of time.”

--With assistance from Jinshan Hong and Linda Lew.

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