WUHAN, China (AP) – A year after the lockdown, Wuhan has long since come back to life – but Zhu Tao remains bunkered in his 14th-floor apartment and spends his days scrolling the news, playing virtual football on his PlayStation and to feel that China is poised on the brink of collapse.
He’s blown up thousands of dollars, his savings, stash of beef jerky and chocolate bars, bottled water and bags of rice, masks, alcohol and disinfectant wipes, and a $ 900 solar panel.
Zhu haunts fears that the virus could return – that the government will once again cover up the truth and that Wuhan will be shut down again.
“I’m in a state of eating and waiting for death, eating and waiting for death,” Zhu said, with a buzzcut that he trimmed himself, as he doesn’t dare go to the hairdresser. “People like me may be in the minority, but I take it very seriously.”
Zhu, a 44-year-old smelter at the state-run iron and steel works, is well outside the mainstream in China. He is a hard-boiled government critic, an on-and-off demonstrator, a supporter of the Hong Kong democracy movement.
He and others willing to publicly declare such views are ridiculed, rejected or silenced. They are a minority in an increasingly authoritarian and prosperous China, where protest is less tolerated and there is less sense in it.
Early in the Wuhan outbreak, which would later spread around the world and kill more than 2 million people, Zhu ignored state media reports that downplayed the virus and stayed at home, a move that left him, his wife and may have saved his son from an infection.
A fleeting few months, when public anger erupted against the authorities who hid crucial information about the coronavirusZhu felt his early caution was justified, his deep distrust of government officials justified.
But as the winter softened into spring and Wuhan’s lockdown was lifted, the mood changed. Now Wuhan’s wealthy kids drink pricey bottles of whiskey and turn to smashing electronics in the city’s posh nightclubs. Thousands of people throng Jianghan Road, the city’s main shopping street.
Once seen as prophetic, Zhu has now become a pariah, and his anti-state sentiment is increasingly at odds with government orthodoxy. He has alienated his in-laws and neighbors and has been arrested, checked and censored.
He braces himself for another wave of infection and wonders how it is possible for everyone around him to just get on with life.
“This is the greatest historical event of the last century,” said Zhu. “But everyone has returned to their lives, just like before the epidemic. … How can they be so numb, so indifferent, as if they had barely experienced anything? “
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Zhu grew up in the 1980s, a politically open era in 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 suited Zhu, given his self-proclaimed “very naughty, very rebellious” nature and his intellectual instincts, reflected in the way he laced his language with literary references, despite never having attended college.
He was just a child during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of people went to Beijing’s central square to claim democratic rights. But in the years following the bloody military crackdown on the protesters, he read more about it as he grew more sympathetic, even as others became cynical, indifferent, or even supportive of the Communist Party rule, won over by China’s growing prosperity.
When Zhu first 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 that patrol the Internet today, and uncensored news about the government was constantly exploding online.
The first controversy to catch Zhu’s attention was a scandal over contaminated powdered milk that killed six babies and sickened tens of thousands. He joined chat groups and gatherings and slowly slipped into dissident circles.
After President Xi Jinping – China’s most authoritarian leader in decades – came to power, Zhu’s views increasingly troubled him. In 2014, he was detained for a month after donning a black shirt and a white flower in a Wuhan Square in memory of the Tiananmen Square crackdown that estranged him from his teenage son.
But when a mysterious respiratory illness began spreading through Wuhan early last year, Zhu’s deep-seated skepticism toward the government suddenly turned prescient. After seeing rumors of the disease in late December 2019, Zhu began warning friends and family. Many brushed him off like a stubborn gadfly, but his wife and son stayed at home, saving them from forays that would soon make relatives sick.
The first to fall ill was his wife’s aunt, who started 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 it was his neighbor’s mother.
Then came the lockdown proclaimed without warning on January 23 at 2am. Wuhan ran into the history books, the epicenter of the greatest quarantine in history. The virus has ravaged the city of 11 million, flooded hospitals and killed thousands, including his wife’s aunt on Jan. 24.
Zhu took grim satisfaction to be proved right. He watched on social media as public anger exploded and turned feverish in February with the death of Li Wenliang., a Wuhan physician who was punished for warning others about the disease that would claim his life.
That night, Zhu sat glued to his phone, scrolling through hundreds of messages condemning censorship. There were hashtags demanding freedom of speech. Shortly before his death, there was a quote from Li in a Chinese magazine: “A healthy society should not have one voice”.
Early the next morning, many of the posts had been cleared by censorship. On his wife’s death certificate, doctors wrote that she died of a common lung infection, even though she had tested positive for the coronavirus. That reinforced Zhu’s suspicion that the cases were grossly under-counted.
“I was so angry it hurt,” he said. ‘I had nowhere to express my emotions. You wanna kill somebody, you’re so mad, you know? “
The outbreak strained Zhu’s relationships. His neighbor, a childhood friend, argued with Zhu after doctors told the neighbor’s mother that she just had normal pneumonia.
‘I questioned him. “How can you be sure what the hospital told you was the truth?” Zhu recalled. “I said you still had to be careful.”
A week later, his friend’s mother died. The corona virus was the cause on her death certificate. They argued the day she died, with Zhu’s friend accusing him of cursing his mother. The two have not spoken since.
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In April, the lockdown was lifted after 76 days. But while others went back to work, Zhu asked for a year of sick leave and locked himself up. His quarantine lasted almost 400 days and is still counting.
He refused to attend his cousin’s and aunt’s funerals that summer, even though there were no new cases in Wuhan. His angry in-laws broke off contact.
Bags of like-minded people can still be found in China, from renegade intellectuals in Beijing to a punk cafe in Inner Mongolia where posters and stickers read “ preventable and controllable ” – quietly berating the phrase officials used to downplay the virus.
In Wuhan, dissident circles gather in encrypted chats to exchange information. At small gatherings over tea, they whine with a dash of pride at party line inconsistencies, saying they saved themselves from the virus by not trusting the government.
But under the watchful eye of state cameras and censors, there is little room to organize or connect. In the run-up to this year’s lockdown anniversary, police have taken at least one dissenter from Wuhan. He was bei luyou, or “tourist,” the playful phrase activists use to describe how the police take troublemakers on involuntary vacations in sensitive moments.
In his self-quarantine, Zhu has found comfort in the literature. He is attracted to Soviet writers poking fun at Moscow’s massive propaganda apparatus. He is also convinced that the virus could spread widely, even though the official number of cases in China is now much lower than that of most other countries.
“They’ve been lying for so long,” said Zhu, “so long that even if they started telling me the truth, I won’t believe it.”
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Associated Press video journalist Emily Wang and photographer Ng Han Guan contributed to this report.