WUHAN, China (AP) – A year after the blockade, Wuhan has long since come to life – but Zhu Tao remains sheltered in his apartment on the 14th floor, spending his days scouring the news, playing virtual football on his PlayStation and feeling that China is teetering on the verge of collapse.
He spent thousands of dollars, his life savings, stocking jerky and chocolate bars, water bottles and rice bags, masks, alcohol and disinfectant wipes and a $ 900 solar panel.
Haunting Zhu is the fear that the virus will come back – that, once again, the government will hide the truth and, once again, Wuhan will fall into the blockade.
“I’m in a state of eating and waiting for death, eating and waiting for death,” said Zhu, with a cut that he trimmed himself, since he dares not venture into the barber. “People like me may be in the minority, but I take it very seriously.”
Zhu, a 44-year-old smelter at the city’s state iron and steel factory, is well out of trend in China. He is a tough critic of the government, an intermittent protester, a supporter of the democratic movement in Hong Kong.
He and others willing to publicly expose such views are ridiculed, rejected or silenced. They are a minority in an increasingly authoritarian and prosperous China, where there is less tolerance for protests and less appetite for doing so.
At the start of the Wuhan outbreak, which would later spread around the world and kill more than 2 million people, Zhu ignored state media reports that minimized the virus and stayed at home, an attitude that may have saved him, his wife and your child’s infection.
For a few fleeting months, while public anger exploded against the authorities that hid critical information about the coronavirus, Zhu felt his initial caution was justified, and his deep suspicion of officers justified.
But when winter turned to spring and Wuhan’s blockade was lifted, the weather changed. Now, Wuhan’s rich boys drink expensive bottles of whiskey and enjoy electronic music in the city’s chic nightclubs. Thousands flock to Jianghan Road, the city’s main shopping street.
Once seen as prophetic, Zhu has now become an outcast, his anti-state feeling increasingly at odds with government orthodoxy. He alienated his in-laws and neighbors and was detained, subjected to surveillance and censored.
Preparing for another wave of infection, he wonders how it is possible for everyone around him to continue his normal life.
“This is the biggest historic event of the past century,” said Zhu. “But they all went back to their lives, as before the epidemic. … How can they be so numb, so indifferent, as if they have hardly experienced anything? “
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Zhu grew up in the 1980s, a politically open era in China, when teachers sometimes touched on concepts like democracy and freedom of expression after the disastrous turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
It was suitable for Zhu, given his “very naughty, very rebellious” nature and his intellectual instincts, reflected in the way he peppered his language with literary references, even though he never went to college.
He was just a child during the Tiananmen protests in 1989, when hundreds of thousands came to Beijing’s central square to demand democratic rights. But in the years after the bloody military crackdown on protesters, he read more about it, growing in solidarity even as others became cynical, indifferent or even supporters of the Communist Party government, won over by China’s growing prosperity.
When Zhu first connected a decade ago, he found that other people shared his way of thinking. China has not yet developed the sophisticated Internet police force that patrols the web today, and uncensored news about the government was constantly exploding online.
The first controversy that caught Zhu’s attention was a scandal over contaminated milk powder that killed six babies and made tens of thousands sick. He joined chat groups and meetings and slowly slid into dissident circles.
After President Xi Jinping – China’s most authoritarian leader in decades – came to power, Zhu’s views brought him more and more problems. In 2014, he was detained for a month after wearing a black shirt and a white flower in a Wuhan square in honor of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, driving him away from his teenage son.
But when a mysterious respiratory illness began to spread to Wuhan at the beginning of last year, Zhu’s deep skepticism towards the government was suddenly prescient. After seeing rumors of the disease in late December 2019, Zhu began to alert friends and family. Many rejected him as an obstinate fly, but his wife and son stayed at home, saving them from walks that would soon make their 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 accompanied her to the same hospital. So it was your neighbor’s mother.
Then came the blockade, proclaimed without warning on January 23 at 2 am. Wuhan stumbled across history books, the epicenter of the largest quarantine in history. The virus devastated the city of 11 million, flooding hospitals and killing thousands, including his wife’s aunt on January 24.
Zhu felt great satisfaction in being proven right. He watched on social media as public anger exploded, reaching a peak in February with the death of Li Wenliang, a doctor from Wuhan who was punished for warning others about the same disease that would kill his life.
That night, Zhu was glued to the phone, browsing hundreds of posts condemning censorship. There were hashtags demanding free speech. There was a quote from Li to a Chinese magazine shortly before his death: “A healthy society should not have one voice”.
Early the next morning, many of the messages were eliminated by the censors. In his wife’s cousin’s death certificate, doctors wrote that she died of a common lung infection, although she tested positive for the coronavirus. This deepened Zhu’s suspicions that the cases were being rudely counted.
“I was so angry it hurt,” he said. “I had nowhere to vent my emotions. You want to kill someone so angry, you know? “
The outbreak affected Zhu’s relationships. Her neighbor, a childhood friend, fought with Zhu after doctors told the neighbor’s mother that she had a normal lung infection.
“I questioned him. `How can you be sure that what the hospital said to you was true? ‘”, Recalls Zhu. “I said you should still be careful.”
A week later, his friend’s mother passed away. In his death certificate, the coronavirus was given as the cause. 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 blockade was lifted after 76 days. But while others went back to work, Zhu took a year’s sick leave and locked himself up. Its quarantine has lasted almost 400 days and continues to count.
He refused to attend his cousin and aunt’s funeral that summer, although there were no new cases in Wuhan. His furious in-laws cut off contact.
Groups of like-minded people still dot China, from renegade intellectuals in Beijing to a punk café in Inner Mongolia, where posters and stickers say “preventable and controllable” – discreetly mocking the cliché phrase employees used to minimize the virus.
In Wuhan, circles of dissidents gather in encrypted chats to exchange information. In small meetings over tea, they complain about inconsistencies in the party line with a hint of pride, saying that they were saved 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. Before the anniversary of this year’s blockade, the police removed at least one dissident from Wuhan. He was bei luyou, or “tourist”, the fun phrase used by activists to describe how the police take troublemakers on involuntary vacations in delicate moments.
In his quarantine, Zhu found solace in literature. He is attracted to Soviet writers who scoff at Moscow’s vast propaganda apparatus. He is also convinced that the virus may be spreading widely, although the official case count 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 start 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.