Lockdown Redux.

The city of Shanghai, the sprawling metropolis of nearly thirty million inhabitants, the central nervous system of China's financial system, has been languishing under an increasingly severe lockdown for over a month. Under Chairman Xi's increasingly paranoid and equally futile Zero Covid policy, no measure is too painful to the lives of his subjects or too economically calamitous to the fortunes of his Empire. 

The merciless "logic" of stamping out an obscenely transmissible subvariant of the virus necessitates equally obscene policy responses. If elimination of the virus is the panacea, then forcing people to remain at home at all times is inexorably logical. If people starve due to not being allowed to leave the house to shop for groceries, then so be it. After all, they should be grateful they live in a country where they are fortunate enough to order food online. Sure, delivery services are overwhelmed (what else do you expect?), but loyal subjects must not despair. They should be even more grateful that the government will eventually drop off meat, vegetables, and eggs while keeping them safe from this godawful plague. Residents must also endure temporary evacuation of their properties for disinfection, even if they must leave their pets behind. Those who succumb to the virus must be forcefully segregated in quarantine facilities. This is imperative for the preservation and defence of public health and the vigour of the People's Republic of China. Nothing less will suffice. 

The government must also ensure that those pesky radicals who are hellbent on disobeying the Party's diktats are dealt with expeditiously. The residents of Shanghai should understand that the government must install electronic door alarms to prevent mavericks from running out free into the open world and wreaking unimaginable havoc. Of course, after deeming such prophylactic measures insufficient, the government had no choice but to begin fencing up properties to keep the infected zombies indoors. 

The international press has rightly expressed condemnation and moral outrage at the callous policies of the Chinese Communist Party and its farcical objective of eliminating (perhaps) the most contagious virus in human history from its shores. Any decent person must sympathise with the unimaginable suffering imposed on the residents of Shanghai (as well as so many other cities that have been invariably locked down in China). However, what is more outrageous is how much (not all) of the Western press failed in its obligation to hold its governments into account regarding our own grossly disproportionate and convoluted lockdown rules, constantly revised through the last two and something years. 

China is a dystopian totalitarian State, indeed the stuff of Orwell's worst nightmares. We cannot be surprised by the brutality and bluntness of the methods employed to deal with any public emergency (whether real or imagined). Advanced liberal democracies, be it the U.S., the U.K., or Germany, cannot be easily forgiven for some of the draconian restrictions so casually imposed on their citizens. We can and must expect more from our governments. Accounting for the extraordinary differences in governmental structure and the rights of individuals in mature democracies compared to the terror of one-person rule that China exemplifies, many of the legal restrictions so hurriedly imposed on us have been equally unforgivable. The criminalisation of leaving one's home for a solitary walk or run in the park; shuttering places of worship; muzzling the right to protest peacefully; severe limitations on funeral attendance; sustained shutdown of businesses deemed non-essential. The list is too long to note. 

One of the craziest policies was implemented by Australia during the height of the Delta wave, whereby it criminalised the return of its citizens from India, a policy flatly contradicting fundamental principles of international law. Perhaps the most extreme policy was in force in my native England. Travellers arriving from a designated "red list" country (the designation was entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of State for Transport and could be amended at any time, without notice) were required to spend a minimum of ten days at a government-designated hotel. Leaving the room at any time was flatly prohibited unless an attending security official granted permission for a short, segregated walk on hotel grounds. The costs were prohibitively high (>£2,000 for a single traveller). A negative PCR test pre- and post-arrival made no difference to the requirement nor even full vaccination. The maximum punishment allowable by law for contravention of these rules carried ten years imprisonment and a £10,000 fine. Other offences that prescribe a maximum of ten years imprisonment under English law include making threats to kill, administrating poison so as to endanger life, cruelty to persons under the age of 16, engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child, and causing a child to watch a sexual act. 

The cruel and irrational lockdown policies in China represent, in stark light, the results of a myopic focus on a single, irrepressible goal, whereby everything else is sacrificed at its altar. This pathological obsession with protecting "public health" at the expense of everything else - human sanity, economic sustenance, and social relationships - has been equally evident in mature democracies since 2020. The current laissez-faire attitude in dropping almost all COVID restrictions is borne out of necessity and a realisation that this can't go on unabated forever. 

It is our duty to remember this period as the greatest peacetime transgression of civil liberties in history and guard against the temptation of subsuming all aspects of life in the pursuit of a solitary objective of "public health" or "following the science" without challenging our elected officials to justify each and every restriction on our freedoms with clear and convincing evidence. COVID-19 was and is a tragic and very real global public health catastrophe. It ought not to have been such a tragic and very real human rights catastrophe.