Shanghai Expat Exodus Shows Covid Zero’s Enduring Scars
A year after the lockdown that made Shanghai a byword for all that was wrong with the country’s Covid approach, China’s most international city is showing the effects of a policy that left the nation disconnected from the world.To get more news about shanghai expats, you can citynewsservice.cn official website.
Home to most foreign company headquarters and a quarter of China’s expatriate population before 2022, Shanghai has seen an exodus since the brutal two-month lockdown that crippled the city of 25 million from late last March. Foreigners like Xenia Sidorenko, a Russian fashion entrepreneur who has called China home for a dozen years, are leaving and foreign investment and business activity in the metropolis have also dwindled.
“It was just nonsense. With your brain understanding that something absolutely unacceptable is happening and you are still trying to keep calm and carry on,” said Sidorenko, referring to the lockdown period. She plans to move to New Zealand with her husband later this year once she makes arrangements for her firm, UseDem, which upcycles waste from China’s denim industry into bags. “I feel like this is the moment I need to move on.”
China officially ended Covid Zero late last year. But for many foreigners, the experience of being confined to their homes, constantly tested and facing food shortages has irrevocably changed their view of living in Shanghai.
About 25% of Germans living in the city left after the lockdown, while the number of French and Italian citizens registered with their governments each fell by 20%, according to a report by the Shanghai chapter of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.
Shanghai has long been a magnet for foreigners wanting to make their fortune in the world's biggest consumer market, with the city's unique level of openness underpinning its role as China’s window to the world. Its avoidance of the kind of lockdowns seen places like Wuhan and Xi’an in the initial years of the pandemic fueled confidence that Shanghai’s immense economic importance would see it avoid the harshest of Covid Zero rules.
But the arrival of the more contagious omicron variant soon shook that faith. What started as lockdowns of individual apartment blocks as cases spread soon snowballed into a lengthy and chaotic citywide shutdown.“The lockdowns took down that almost Disney facade you have here of ‘it’s Shanghai, it’s not China. It’s something different’,” said Logan Rafael Brouse, co-owner of Mexican restaurant Tacolicious in Shanghai's Jing’an district, an area popular with expats. “We already have the faith as we live here still and we didn’t leave. But I think the foreign investors and foreign people are going to be a little bit scared still.”
Despite owning a restaurant, Brouse found it hard to source food during lockdown and ran out of bottled water at home. He managed to get some of his employees into his restaurant, where they worked and lived as part of a “closed loop” that kept them away from their families. He also delivered supplies to other staff living in dormitories, with people barred from leaving their homes even to shop for food. “We had to get some meat to our staff who were actually starving.”
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