When in his 18 years in Shanghai he began to feel like an animal, Frank Henze knows to the minute.

It was just before four last Saturday afternoon when the engineer at his apartment at 400 Hongqiao Street near the Xujiahui business district in the west of the city heard the sound of a jackhammer, then a flex.

When Henze went to the window, he saw the workers wrapped in white protective suits from head to toe.

They erected a two meter high green iron fence in front of the front door of his high-rise building.

Henrik Ankenbrand

Economic correspondent for China based in Shanghai.

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Then Henze knew what was going on.

In the lockdown that the government has been keeping the 26 million residents of Shanghai at home, in hospitals and quarantine camps, many of them for much longer, since the end of March, thousands of images and videos are circulating on social media every day.

Police officers can be seen beating, isolation containers through whose leaking ceilings the rain pours onto the beds.

A security guard who blows disinfectant on the face and body of a resident of retirement age with a high-pressure cleaner in a residential complex, almost causing her to fall over.

The benchmarks of the zero Covid policy

A few pictures had shown articulated lorries on Shanghai's car feeders, with green lattice fences stacked two and a half meters high on the loading area, like the ones Frank Henze is now putting up in front of the door.

There are four houses in his condominium, each 18 stories high.

There are ten apartments on each floor.

As of April 21, despite testing almost every day, there had not been a single Covid case during the lockdown.

Then suddenly it was said that residents of four apartments had shown a positive result.

By the standards of China's zero-Covid policy, the Henze family home was now a hotspot.

Henze, 64 years old, comes from Hildesheim.

He did his doctorate in high-frequency technology at the TU Braunschweig.

He has lived in Brazil, in the USA, in France.

He liked Shanghai so much that he stayed.

Today he teaches prospective young engineers at a college there.

He is married to a Chinese woman who brought her 17-year-old son into the marriage.

Until a few years ago, Henze enjoyed life to the fullest in lively Shanghai.

State arbitrariness has been known for a long time

The fact that people in China are locked up en masse also happened recently before the Shanghai lockdown.

But the harshness of the Chinese regime was shown 4,000 kilometers away, in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

Being a victim of government tyranny is a new experience for most Shanghai residents, both local and foreign.

Chinese who can afford it are currently flooding agencies with requests to move abroad.

Germans left the city in droves, the German Consulate General has registered.

International schools in the city estimate they are losing at least 40 per cent of their teachers to lockdown experiences.

In online surveys, as many as 85 percent of the foreigners surveyed stated that