If Chinese leaders decide to live with covid, it would take many months to change course, not least to fully vaccinate tens of millions of old people
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskSome lessons about outlaw life border on the comic. Just ask the hipsters drawn to Beijing’s burgeoning underground club scene. They are learning that “ruins parties”—secret dance-nights held in empty office blocks or disused commercial sites—may be more romantic in the telling than in reality.
Inspected by your columnist several days after it hosted a pop-up club, a venue in northern Beijing is more gritty than glamorous. It is reached by climbing over railings into a weed-choked, abandoned entertainment complex. Arrows and graffiti tags are spray-painted on walls within, marking a route past dining tables still decorated with plastic flowers and thick layers of dust, then down marble stairs into a dark, cavernous basement.
Yet, revealingly, ruins parties are not seen primarily as acts of thrill-seeking rebellion. A college graduate who attends such parties says that she and her friends would rather go to regular nightclubs, but are prevented by pandemic rules that they consider “stupid”. The young woman describes how she accepted controls early in the pandemic, frightened by reports of deaths and of overwhelmed hospitals.
Until recently, scofflaws tricked guards and taxi drivers by showing old screenshots of green health codes, avoiding the need to scancodes afresh. To stop this, the latest Beijing health codes boast an animated border and a synthesised voice. Rule-breakers now record short videos of a scan generating a health code, and show them. Others boast of maintaining two health codes, one registered with their Chinese identity card and one with a passport.
In truth, if leaders decide to live with covid, it would take many months to change course, not least to fully vaccinate tens of millions of old people. That decision may be a while off. President Xi Jinping continues to call zero-covid proof of the superiority of Communist Party rule, next to decadent Western democracies. Covid’s economic impact makes many headlines. But the party should worry about echoes of Prohibition, too.