The 2022 Shanghai lockdown came to Clay’s neighborhood early and caught him off-guard. Struggling with his mental health, Clay documents how lockdown works on a granular level giving listeners an audio tour of his neighborhood as it plunges into the uncertainty of all the minutiae of day-to-day life living under the control of the apparatuses that shut down an entire city for several months. The boredom, the stress, the terror. He documents clashes with local bureaucracy and the ingenuity of the people of Shanghai who had to live through these dark and strange times. Clay ventures out into a city as it’s about to enter the full city lockdown and gives listeners a sense of what a city looks like before it’s irrevocably changed.
Works consulted
Shanghai COVID: China announces largest city-wide lockdown / BBC
Shanghai residents remain largely locked down despite easing / Bloomberg (paywall)
Xi Jinping and the administrative hierarchy and subdivisions in China / Institute for Security & Development Policy
From Mass Campaigns to Managed Campaigns: “Constructing a New Socialist Countryside” / Elizabeth J. Perry
Community grid system helps China fight virus / Global Times
Neighborhood committees are in the vanguard of virus control / Global Times
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184356.shtml
Grassroots Participation and Repression under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping / University of Chicago
A Tragedy of the Commons: Property Rights Issues in Shanghai Historic Residences / Penn State International Law Review
Pocket of poverty the new Shanghai has left behind / The Sydney Morning Herald
Shanghai’s ‘Old West Gate’ neighborhood emptied for demolition and redevelopment – video / SCMP (paywall)
Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life – Ch. 4
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