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