I lasted three years in China without taking a COVID test

I had no idea they poked that far back. I had heard of the throat-tickle of course: the gag reflex when the Q-tip scrapes those inner reaches of your palette or tongue where no cotton bud should ever venture. Yet my first time was not gentle. I had a stabber.

This is all more than familiar for anyone living in China over the last few years. Regular testing, as frequently as once every three days in Beijing or Shanghai, has been so par for the course that it has faded into the background of daily life. Nucleic acid swab stations are on every urban street corner; their patrons drop by in the same way they would grab a morning Starbucks, zealously guarding their green codes. Several friends estimate they have had up to 200 COVID tests since the pandemic began. Yet, to their open disbelief, I hadn’t taken a single one.

My tactic for getting away with this was very simple: I lived in Dali, Yunnan, and hadn’t left my mountain village since January 2020. While a tourist town, new arrivals were tested at the airport or train station, and no tests (or even a green code or mask) were required to move around inside the valley. There was a limited lockdown in February 2020, lifted in March, and none since then. Yunnan province has been relatively relaxed in its enforcement of COVID policy — with the exception of Kunming, the provincial capital, and Ruili on the border of Myanmar, which has been a lockdown hellscape. In its more rural climes, it is easy to forget one lives in the only remaining nation with a zero-COVID hardline.

This is a point that gets lost in the headlines: for the majority of the population, in lower-tier cities or the countryside, COVID policy is an inconvenience at worst, a point of national pride at best. None of this is a defense of the policy, which is kneecapping China’s economy and backing it into a corner politically. Yet defend it the people do, outside of big cities that have seen sustained lockdowns. For the majority of those who have not been negatively affected — especially those who follow the propaganda on state media — China is the last bastion of sanity and, as historian Jeremiah Jenne put it to me, “the rest of the world is World War Z.”

This became clear in an exchange with a local business owner, Mr. Xu. He had taken a few tests here and there, entering and exiting the valley. He had to scan his travel code and show his health code frequently. He had never been quarantined or locked down, but says it is “necessary, very good” that others are. All of these measures — which urbanites gripe over — were to Mr. Xu a sign of China’s advanced health policy.

“How many COVID cases are there in your England?” he asked me, rhetorically, and didn’t give me a chance to respond. “China is better, isn’t it?”

I tried to formulate a dispassionate answer that, yes, England has many more COVID cases and deaths. Also it is emerging with immunity while China’s economy is suffering. He turned and left without a word, massaging his belly. There would be no discussion.

Having been lulled into the same complacency myself, having had no direct contact with the excesses of COVID policy — or even with the pointy end of a Q-tip — it was a wake-up call when last month I finally left my self-sequestration.

Yes, dear reader, I have broken my streak. After three years (well, shy three months of it), in the last three weeks I have taken 15 throat-swab tests. Some were stabbers, some ticklers; some explorers, others gorers; some dabbed, some jabbed, a few stayed in there till I gagged. One kept me aah-ing till I drooled like a dog onto the pavement.

On a road trip up and down the three parallel rivers of Yunnan, I was stopped whenever entering a new jurisdiction, registered, green-code checked, and given a swab. To my delight I had two tests performed in the space of 25 minutes, on entering and exiting a short-hop stretch of highway in the lower Nu River. One station rang my mobile and asked me to return, as they had forgotten to take a picture of my passport; if I didn’t comply they would report my license plate to the police. I could always tell when a top cadre was angling for promotion, as that county had the strictest measures.

Flying to Beijing was even more of a shock. Here, my every movement was tracked, not just entry and exit. Like the naive rube I had become, I was scanning codes when asked. The Beijing Health Kit app knew which brand of coffee I purchased at Daxing Airport, which cab I took to what apartment block in Chaoyang District, whose food I ate that evening, when I indulged in a cocktail after, and whether I got back to my apartment. After two days, of course I got a dreaded pop-up, and had to queue for two consecutive-day tests at a special booth to get rid of it.

What was even more surprising — besides the culturally sterilized city Beijing has become, but that’s for another post — was how fed up everyone was with it all. Granted, I had arrived during the 20th Party Congress, the most tightly controlled time to land. But discontent was palpable, from grumbling cabbies to business owners whose livelihoods were affected, to disaffected intellectuals preparing to run. “It’s more or less North Korea,” said one bar owner on the formerly bustling Fangjia Hutong (now stripped bare of life, her own bar empty due to both virus and Congress), “or will be in 10 years if it continues like this.”

It struck me that there are two Chinas: one hobbled by zero-COVID, quietly angry and taking it (or, in the case of some in Shanghai, not); another barely inconvenienced. Even in Beijing, in a bout of Stockholm Syndrome, I was impressed by the well-oiled machine that the internal control of COVID has become over these three years. As the security state operated for political dissidents, so too it does for viral vectors: if you are not seen as a risk, it is easy to be lulled into a sense of security. The moment that changes, the police state comes knocking and you realize you never had real freedom to begin with.

The difference is that instead of a tiny fraction being affected, about half the nation has suffered under lockdowns, with fresh protests in Lhasa last week and Foxconn workers fleeing factories in fear of lockdown over the weekend. Yet out of the big cities, that also means about half has not. For the most part, they are happy to go along with the hardline response to COVID, often vocally proud of it, and show little solidarity for those directly affected.

It remains to be seen how long this will be the case. Yet having left my hiding hole, I will not be remaining to find out. After 12 years, I am leaving China — flying back to mythical lands in the West where there are no swab tests, code scanning, and lockdowns. I’ll believe it when I see it. For now, I hope my green code lasts until the airport, and I will think fondly of those three years I escaped the Q-tip’s impudent probing, as of a dream.