The New Yorker - USA (2020-08-17)

THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 35

Initially, the mask­wearing was en­
thusiastic. On the first day of music
class, my daughters were shown how
to play the recorder while masked—
they lifted the bottom hem and shoved
the instrument inside. During school
pickup, I saw teachers who had rigged
up masks with external microphones
that connected to portable speakers on
their hips. But, in the middle of May,
the Chinese Ministry of Education de­
clared that students no longer needed
to cover their faces if they were in low­
risk areas, and our school relaxed the
rules. Some teachers stopped wearing
masks, although nearly all of the chil­
dren kept them on. They found a use
for discarded masks during lunch: they
turned them upside down, like little
pouches, and filled them with bones
and other food to be thrown away.
The school scheduled regular hand­
washing breaks, and every afternoon an
announcement sounded over the inter­
com: “Temperature­taking time has ar­
rived!” Each day, my daughters had their
temperature taken at least five times.
This routine began at 6:30 A.M., when
the class’s WeChat parent group engaged
in something called Jielong, or “Connect
the Dragon.” One parent would start
the hashtag #Jielong, and list her child’s
name, student number, temperature in
Celsius, and the words “Body is healthy.”
One by one, other parents jumped in—
“36.5, Body is healthy”—lengthening
the list with every dragon link. My ac­
count usually had about sixty of these
messages every day. After eight o’clock,
impatient notes were sent to stragglers:
“To so­and­so’s father, please quickly
connect the dragon!”
I lived in fear of the dragon. My
mornings were a mess of fiddling with
apps; one consisted of a daily form for
the university on which I listed my tem­
perature, location, and whether I had
had contact with anyone from Hubei,
the province that contains Wuhan, in
the past fourteen days. If I missed the
noon deadline, an overworked admin­
istrator sent a gently passive­aggressive
reminder. (April 11, 12:11 P.M.: “Hi
Teacher Hessler, How are you doing
today?”) In addition, a QR code with a
health report had to be scanned every
morning for each of my daughters. I
often felt overwhelmed, not to mention
a little odd: during the first month of

dragon­connecting, I received 1,146

WeChat messages listing the body tem­

peratures of third graders.

I

wondered how much of this was the­

atre. Epidemiologists told me that

temperature checks, though useful, rep­

resent a crude tool, and they generally

believe that social distancing is more

effective than mask use. One epidemi­

ologist in Shanghai told me that peo­

ple should wear face coverings, but he

noted that there are no data on the level

of effectiveness as public policy, because

mask use could also affect behavior.

And, while Chinese officials required

citizens to wear masks from the begin­

ning of the lockdown, they didn’t ac­

tually depend much on them. China

never allowed residents to move freely

in a community with significant viral

spread, hoping that masks, social dis­

tancing, and good judgment would re­

duce infections.

Instead, the strategy was to enforce

a lockdown until the virus was elim­

inated. The elementary school never

bothered with more effective but dis­

ruptive policies—reducing class size, re­

modelling facilities, instituting outdoor

learning—because the virus was not

spreading in Chengdu. And, while the

government hadn’t trusted people to set

the terms of their own behavior during

lockdown, it did depend heavily on their

willingness to work hard for various or­

ganizations that fought the pandemic.

A number of my students, including

Serena, researched neighborhood com­

mittees in their home towns. Serena

took her usual dogged approach—for

much of two months, she spent two or

three days a week with a local commit­

tee. She told me that, before the pan­

demic, she hadn’t even been aware that

these organizations existed. They were

like ancient organisms gone dormant:

back in the eighties and nineties, when

the Party interfered more in private lives,

neighborhood committees had been

prominent. But there had been a long

period during which they played a di­

minished role for most residents.

After President Xi Jinping came to

power, in 2012, he set about strength­

ening Party structures, including a new

emphasis on neighborhood commit­

tees. This process was accelerated by the

pandemic, and Serena and other stu­

dents observed how quickly these or­

ganizations grew in their communities.

With new government funding, com­

mittees hired contract workers, some of

whom were local shop owners who had

been forced to close down. Neighbor­

hood crews went door to door, giving

out information, questioning residents

to see if they had been to high­risk areas,

and helping with contact tracing. Some­

times they made mistakes. At the end

of January, an official whom Serena

profiled was assigned to a compound

with 1,136 units. For two days, the offi­

cial and some subcontractors worked

from eight in the morning until mid­

night, climbing stairways and knock­

ing on doors. But they missed one apart­

ment: when there was no answer, they

failed to leave a note, and they didn’t go

back for a second check.

Soon that kind of error was no lon­

ger made. In the time that Serena spent

with the committee members, she ob­

served them becoming more profes­

sional. They came to understand their

role, along with the stakes of the pan­

demic. The Chinese state press reported

that fifty­three members of neighbor­

hood committees died while working

to control the virus. Others were fired

or chastised for even the smallest mis­

takes. That’s what happened to the offi­

cial in Serena’s home town who missed

the apartment—he was forced to write

a self­criticism, another long­standing

Party tradition. It turned out that the

apartment contained the only corona­

virus case in the residential district, he

told Serena. The occupant—I’ll call him

Liu—had been taking a shower when

the committee members knocked.

At a party a week earlier, Liu had had

a long conversation with a d.j., who, it

was later learned, had been infected by

someone from Hubei. Liu was thirty­

five, single, and highly energetic. The

details of his post­contact movements

are listed on a public WeChat account