Not much could have shocked on day ten of Shanghai's city-wide lockdown, which for millions of people in the city began much earlier.

Then a video emerged of citizens demonstrating against the government in their high-rise buildings, singing on the balconies on the balconies and being rebuked by a soaring drone with a loudspeaker: "Please comply with the Covid restrictions.

Curb your longing for freedom.

Don't open the windows.

Don't sing."

Henrik Ankenbrand

Economic correspondent for China based in Shanghai.

  • Follow I follow

And then the news that after all the other camps in stadiums and halls, the city's largest exhibition center is also being converted into another isolation center with 40,000 camp beds, raised the question, half jokingly, half fearfully, of whether Shanghai now has a Covid virus for every inhabitant. want to make bed.

26 million people live in China's largest metropolis.

Currently, the number of isolation places for anyone who tests positive is heading towards 100,000.

It also sounded painful that, despite protests from EU countries, the Shanghai government still did not make a clear promise not to separate children from their parents if they are hospitalized or sent to camps for weeks.

There were the pictures from the eastern half of Pudong, in which people on the street were obviously fighting with fists for vegetable deliveries.

However, the fact that a turning point had now also dawned in China was only brought to light by the video link to the crisis center of the German economy.

Young people no longer want to go to China

The European Chamber of Commerce in China does not quite live up to its name.

Its most important member companies are almost all from Germany.

Of the eight representatives from China's north, east and south, who reported on the local effects of China's "zero Covid policy" from their areas as if from a disaster area, seven were German.

After they had talked for an hour and a half, one could get the impression that the German economy no longer sees a great future in business with its hitherto most important trading partner.

76 cities in China are in lockdown or their residents are subject to massive freedom restrictions.

In northern Shenyang, where the Bavarian car manufacturer BMW has its plant and where people arriving from abroad had to be in quarantine for six weeks last year and where the airport is now closed, the state banks stopped granting loans because too many companies were forced to measures had gone bankrupt.

It was reported from the port city of Tianjin near Beijing that German employees were refusing to fly to China and start work in the city.

From southern Shenzhen, which has only officially ended its week-long lockdown, the assessment came that the reputation of the technology metropolis as the “Silicon Valley of China” was over for the time being because foreign programmers were leaving the country in droves.

Life in the lockdown country is only "frustration", it was said from western Chengdu.

It has "become almost impossible to get young people interested in China".

But that's probably not the point anymore.

The question is currently the other way around: how do foreigners get out of China as quickly as possible?

The completely sealed off Shanghai is a "ghost town" and in a "state of emergency", reported the deputy chamber chairman Bettina Schön.

The attempt, starting at four in the morning, to order food and water on a smartphone app for hours without success was a “nightmare”.

People would be "terrified" of ending up in one of the quarantine centers, which have such a glaring staff shortage that patients admitted with Covid are made "volunteers" who have to bring food and medicine to other infected people.

Since hardly any machines would take off from the airports, the call for an evacuation from the air was becoming louder in some companies: