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There’s a heatwave hitting Shanghai this week:

Unfortunately for many residents they were forced to stand outside in long lines waiting for COVID tests as the city is now on the bring of another COVID lockdown.

Millions of Shanghai residents braved sweltering heat Tuesday to wait in line for compulsory Covid tests, as growing case numbers and the emergence of a highly infectious Omicron subvariant spurred new fears of a return to mass lockdown.

Shanghai authorities have ordered the majority of the city’s 16 districts to undergo two rounds of testing from Tuesday to Thursday, after a case of the new BA.5.2.1 subvariant was detected in the community on July 8.

Shanghai officials have repeatedly denied that a citywide lockdown is imminent, but that has failed to convince residents, who noted that authorities had also made similar claims in March in the lead up to the previous lockdown.

On Monday, two neighborhood committees in Shanghai said residents should “prepare food and medicines that can last for 14 days at home, to be on the safe side.”

This photo of a health worker trying to cool off with a block of ice circulated online.

Officially, there’s no plan for another lockdown but it appears many Shanghai residents have learned the hard way not to believe anything the government tells them.

“The government has lost the trust of the public,” said Norah Liu, a tech industry worker in Shanghai. “Whatever they will do, I have enough staple food for one month of survival at home anyway.”…

The city’s measures are already drawing criticism for being excessive. Some residents complained about being categorized by health workers as “secondary close contacts” simply because they had been in the same mobile messaging chat group as people who tested positive…

Elsewhere in China, the Omicron variant and its BA.5 subvariant are slipping through the country’s many defenses, posing a challenge to the leadership’s insistence on eradicating infections. The city of Lanzhou in northwestern China imposed a one-week lockdown on its population of about four million starting Wednesday after recording 122 cases in the past week.

There’s good reason at this point for China to segue away from its zero-Covid policy. The lockdowns have been playing havoc with the country’s economy.

China’s economic engine has shuddered in recent months, hurt by lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of Covid. Housing sales sagged. Many shops and restaurants in some cities shuttered, some maybe for good. Youth unemployment climbed.

The slowdown has kindled doubts about the viability of China’s stringent strategy of eliminating virtually all Covid-19 infections — whether the cure is becoming worse than the social and economic costs of restrictions. But on a recent visit to Wuhan, the city where the pandemic first took hold, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said extinguishing Covid remained paramount…

The Chinese government is scheduled to release the main economic data for this year’s second quarter on Friday. According to a survey by Bloomberg, economists expect that the Chinese government will report that gross domestic product grew about 1 percent in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier. That’s a big comedown from the 4.8 percent expansion in the first quarter, and is likely to put the government’s 5.5 percent growth goal for all of this year out of reach…

“Often, the heads of different departments and companies attend one meeting in the morning about enhancing dynamic zero, and then in the afternoon a meeting about economic growth,” said Wu Qiang, an independent political commentator in Beijing.

“The tensions are within Xi’s own model for governing the country,” he said. “The tensions really arise from him.”

But of course the great benefit of being a dictator in a one-party state is that no one is allowed to disagree with your dictates even if they are contradictory and don’t make any sense. So Xi Jinping will continue to be praised as a mastermind even as people in one of the nation’s biggest cities are storing up a month’s worth of food to deal with the looming disaster of another potential lockdown.

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