Why people are screaming from their apartments in Shanghai | ErykBagshaw
Residents screaming from their windows, desperate fathers attempting to break through police lines, entire apartment blocks running out of food.
“In Shanghai, we’re in the middle of the hurricane, this is also a lesson for all the other cities in China,” said Rodrigo Zeidan, a professor of business at NYU Shanghai and Fundacao Dom Cabral who lives in the Chinese metropolis.“It was chaos. There’s a lot of frustration and anger, there are all sorts of feelings. It’s a city of 30 million people. So, there are 30 million individuals with their own feelings.
“[There was] insufficient labour to compensate for the total shift of consumption from a variety of places to one place – your home,” said David Fishman, an energy market analyst who lives in Shanghai.In their compounds, residents have had to co-ordinate with hundreds of neighbours to place orders big enough to bring in entire truckloads of shopping.
Zeidan said as an economist it was interesting to see supply chains break down in real life, but the experience had also shown how Chinese communities could band together when the government failed. A worker in protective gear holds a sign which reads “Do not crowd” during a mass testing day for residents in a lockdown area in the Jingan district of western Shanghai.“The only way that you don’t go hungry is if you count on our neighbours. It’s basic social insurance. It’s something that has carried on and taught lessons that people are applying today.”