Cooked in Shanghai — Editor’s Note for Friday, April 22, 2022

Dear reader,

“Don’t eat me!” That was the plea of one African American resident of a Shanghai apartment complex after one of his neighbors suggested that they “eat the black guy.” The conversation happened in a WeChat group in which a locked down community was trying to figure out how to get enough food. Jacobie, the potential menu item, has a pretty solid sense of humor, and he spoke to Shanghai Youtuber Teacher Mike about his experience finding himself discussed as dinner.

Jacobie looks like he’s doing just fine, but like everyone else in Shanghai, he is having a very tough spring. “Two months ago you couldn’t go 500 meters in this city without stumbling across an oat milk latte or a hip store. Two weeks ago I traded a slab of pork for milk for my children,” the Economist Group’s Mattie Bekink told us in an interview this week.

“I’m planning my exit. I’m super over this,” tweeted the Shanghai-dwelling man behind the History of China podcast. “How can I leave Shanghai?” was the question posed by almost every online attendee of a Shanghai government press conference about the lockdown situation on April 18 (see screenshot). And people all over China are talking about the censorship of news about the Shanghai lockdowns, as we report today in a story about a viral video published this morning.

The effects of the Shanghai lockdown will be global, and they will hit you and me in some way in the short term and in the long term, no matter where you live. There’s more on this in my Q&A with Howie Snyder this week linked below.

Beijing stimulus is coming: The global economy is probably going to tank this year, and the Chinese economy is certainly in for a helluva beating. But one thing you can rely on is that Beijing will unleash some stimulus money and build some new stuff.

In our new weekly column on Chinese markets and how to invest in them, Gerard DeBenedetto looks at which investable companies will do well from the stimmie.

If you need more news than you get from our daily newsletter, check out the firehose: our China News Base where you can find everything we publish, and all the links we find on the internet and think you might want to know about.

Our phrase of the week is: making pots of cash (盆满钵满 pén mǎn bō mǎn). If you like our phrase of the week, check out the archives, or author Andrew Methven’s Slow Chinese newsletter.