After the city incarcerated its 25 million residents and grounded most delivery services in early April, many people experienced difficulties finding food, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Some set alarms for the different delivery times of grocery delivery apps that start as early as 6 a.m.
For the past few days, a hot topic in WeChat groups has been whether sprouted potatoes were safe to eat, a few Shanghai residents told me. Neighbors resorted to a barter system to, for example, trade a cabbage for a bottle of soy sauce. Coca-Cola is hard currency.
After being incarcerated for nearly two weeks, Dai Xin, a restaurant owner, is running out of food to support her household of four. Now she slices ginger thinly, packs vegetables so they don’t spoil, and eats two meals a day instead of three.
Even the wealthy are struggling with food shortages. The head of a major retail chain told me last week that she was getting a lot of requests from CEOs in Shanghai. But there was little she could do under the lockdown rules, the executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity given political sensitivities.
Wang Lixiong, the author of the apocalyptic novel “China Tidal Wave,” which ended with a major famine in the wake of a nuclear winter, believes a man-made crisis like the one in Shanghai is inevitable under China’s authoritarian system. In recent years, he said in an interview, the risk has increased after Beijing curtailed almost every aspect of civil society.
After moving into a friend’s vacant apartment in Shanghai last winter, he stocked up on rice, noodles, canned food and whiskey to support him in the event of a crisis for a few months.
But many residents of the luxury apartment complex, which has units valued at more than $3 million, were not so prepared when the lockdown began. He saw his neighbours, who were running around in designer suits a month ago, venturing into the complex’s lush garden to dig up bamboo shoots for a meal.
