China During Covid-19: From a Foreigner’s Perspective
After I got out of quarantine, I wish I could say China became a more exciting and cheerful place. But I am a truthful person and that would be lying. What is apparent to me, however, is that China changed a great deal after the initial outbreak of Covid-19. Few of the changes, in my opinion, were for the better. China before Covid-19 was already known for the control and surveillance it exercised over its citizens. As with many other changes throughout the world, Covid-19 only accelerated these trends.
In the United States, there was a great outcry over any lockdown or mask mandate that did occur during Covid-19. If you can imagine these measures being multiplied a thousandfold with additional surveillance, then you have somewhat of an idea of just what it is like to live in China during Covid-19. From what I saw, China from 2020 to 2021 (outside of Wuhan which I never visited) was not quite as repressive as what happened with the outbreak of the Omicron variant in 2022. Nonetheless, it was apparent that the additional measures to control the pandemic were multiplying and would be in China to stay for the foreseeable future.
China After My Quarantine
When I got out of my fourteen-day quarantine, the world, not just China, felt different somehow. Daytime felt very bright even though it was a fairly cloudy day when my quarantine ended. Upon leaving the hotel, one of the first things I was told was that I was not allowed to leave Wuxi for now in this uncertain time. This rule would be in place more often than not which made one of the main attractions (for me) of living in China less appealing. I have nothing against Wuxi, but honestly, the city does not have much to offer for a foreigner. Unless you plan to settle down there to raise a family, it is just not that exciting to be in without having the opportunity to travel to many places. One of my reasons for staying as long as I did was that my job felt relatively stable in a time of mass lockdowns around the world when so many people were losing their jobs. And travel around the world from 2020 to 2021 seemed relatively limited so I felt I was not missing out on much anyway.
So actually I am not sure about the rest of China as I was not allowed to go anywhere outside of Wuxi, but from what I did see I could imagine many other Chinese cities were the same way. After I got out of quarantine, I decided to take a walk around the city to see what might have changed. One thing I immediately noticed is almost everyone was wearing masks. Before the pandemic, there were some people in China (as well as the other East Asian countries) who wore masks in public for sanitary reasons. But now everyone had them on as a way of helping to prevent the spread of Covid-19. For every single public building, you could not get in without having a mask. And there was someone always ready to check your temperature to make sure it was not too high.
But perhaps the most novel requirement now was that you had to present a green health code from your phone to people at the entrance of almost every public area if you wanted to enter. As all of these codes are tracked carefully by the authorities in China, they can tell who has or has not been to medium or high-risk areas for contracting Covid-19. There is also some sort of algorithm that determines if you might be at risk of spreading Covid-19. If it is yellow, you will be asked to stay at home for seven days. Red means automatic quarantine again for fourteen days. Throughout the rest of my time in China, my code never was anything other than green thankfully. But I did not travel to any medium or high-risk areas, staying mostly in Wuxi and if I was lucky in Shanghai as well.
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Also, I could not help but notice that some people around Wuxi looked at me a lot differently now in the early days of the pandemic. Because I was a foreigner, they were afraid that I might be carrying the virus back into China from abroad so in some places I was outright refused entry. This may be because I did not have the health code yet installed on my phone, but it probably would not have mattered much either way as it was a very uncertain time in early 2020. I have also heard of other foreigners having this same problem, but as the year progressed and the border all but shut down, Chinese people, in general, went back to being their curious old selves about foreigners instead of being almost unwelcoming.
School in China During the Early Stages of Covid-19
Classes at my high school continued online for about a month even after I left quarantine. Some teachers at my school could not makeit back to China for a while, so those teachers did remote teaching for the rest of the school year. One positive thing I will say about China is that schools are some of the first places to open after a lockdown occurs. In the United States for the past two years, this has often been the opposite case. Now as I said before, teaching remotely does not bother me much at all, but for my students, this was a less than ideal situation. Possibly because education is taken very seriously in China, the authorities were always looking for excuses to get children back for in-person classes. I could say with confidence from 2020 to 2021, China had many more schools open than the United States.
When my classes went back to being in person, there were several big changes I noticed. One was that temperature checks happened every single day to enter school which never really stopped to the day I stopped teaching there. Another was that everyone, teachers and students, all had to wear masks during class and the students all stayed in one room the entire day instead of switching rooms for classes. And lunch was being served outside, but since I did not eat at the school cafeteria this was not a change that concerned me. I could tell that the students were glad to be back for in-person classes as they felt somewhat lonely during remote learning. Also, cleaning and disinfecting happened daily to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. At first, teachers were required to help with the cleaning which was extra work not in the contract I signed but I did not make a big deal out of it.
As the school year progressed, eventually things at school returned somewhat back to normal. We did not have to wear masks all day and we stopped having to deal with cleaning the classrooms, but the temperature checks were always in place at the entrance. For the rest of 2020, we did not return to remote learning unlike many schools in the United States, so I would have to say education in China remained in much better shape.
Summer Break of 2020
Well before summer break came around in 2020, I was already aware that I would not be able to leave China to visit my home or go traveling to another country. I mean I could leave China, but the main worry is they would not let me back in as the border was sealed to all foreigners, even if they had work visas. I could, however, travel within China for that summer. But instead of doing much traveling to different places, I decided to have Chinese classes in Shanghai almost every day as Iwanted to make some progress in learning Chinese while I was there in China. Although I was not able to make it home, I was very grateful for the fact that I still got paid a full salary during the summer which rarely happens for public school teachers in the United States.
After the summer break of 2020 drew to a close, we began the next school year of 2020–2021 still very much amid Covid-19 as was much of the rest of the world.
