I have been living in Beijing since 2018 as a student, majoring in Inter-Cultural Communication. On December 21, 2019, the news of a deadly virus engulfing Wuhan left everyone shaken. By then, universities were closing for winter vacations and we were planning our trips to different parts of China. Beijing has a population of 21 million people, majority of them from other provinces or rural areas. The biggest Chinese cultural event “Spring Festival” was taking place on January 24, 2020 and people had started returning to their hometowns.
The corona epidemic shattered our plans and now we were after our lives. In such situation, family members back in faraway homelands particularly get panicked. They started storming our phones, asking us to immediately return. But I decided to stay in Beijing. The reasons were many; I lacked resources, had to work on my research thesis as internet facility is not available in my village in the ex-FATA, and only few months were left for my graduation. Also I believed China is a developed country and will defeat the virus.
But Beijing, a highly busy city, went emptied within hours. The streets, bustling with life, stood deserted. Perhaps Beijing’s hundreds of factories and 6 million cars also stopped emitting smoke because for the first time, we could see the hills around the city from our dormitory’s 10th floor. These are the mountains upon which some of the Great Wall’s portion rest.
Food prices soared 3-5 times. Masks and sanitizers disappeared from the markets as well as from the e-shopping service Taobao. Our university enacted strict rules. Our travel data was immediately collected. To bring food and other items, now we could only leave the campus for two hours every week, after wearing a special pass. Daily, the staff twice checks our body temperature. Entering market, restaurant or printing café, a person will greet you with a thermal gun. While undergoing the ‘greetings’, we fear too much because even if we have seasonal fever, they will pick up and land in a hospital. There, even if we don’t have corona, we will catch one.
All internal alleys in the university have been shut except one. Outside the campus, police guard every corner and entrance point. Walking to the market, my temperature was checked at least 10 times. I thought with myself these obnoxious checkpoints even traveled behind me to China from FATA. The only difference is, in FATA, they check our patriotic temperature. Our dormitory staff efficiently dose disinfector spray five times a day. Similarly, the authorities disinfect everyplace. We are not sure whether it is effective, as we yet don’t know whether corona is an airborne disease or not.
In the beginning, we feared too much that since China has a porous border and frequent travel with Pakistan, the virus first of all will be transmitted to our country. And since our healthcare infrastructure is dilapidated, corona will exact a heavy toll on us. Also the state has kept masses ignorant and superstitious through a brigade of clerics and religious quackers. Even we don’t lack clean-shaven ‘doctors, both PhDs and MBBs’ versions of them on mainstream media. But it is strange, and we should appreciate Chines and Pakistani border authorities for it, that the virus came to Pakistan from Iran for which we should equally hold responsible Pak-Iran border administration.
Meanwhile, besides the virus, disinformation also raged across the world. Both Western and our society’s response was more hubristic and racist. We boasted our divine hygienics while the West bragged its superior health system. The virus exposed both.
Since China’s media is in state control. Fake news (defined by the state) cannot be spread. Chinese government has a super digital penetration in and outreach to its population, people only rely on information and instruction provided by the state. Although China doesn’t have the menace of Bengali Babas and peers/mullahs but Chinese people too have their babas in the form of party absolutist members and bureaucratic elite. They speak the ultimate truth. Any defiance is blasphemy.
To externalize people’s attention and anger from domestic reasons of the epidemic such as earlier repression of information about corona by a doctor and the unlawful and extremely dangerous wild animal trade in China, the Chinese state and media picked up on Western media’s ‘sinophobia’. Specifically, their target was a cartoon published in a Danish newspaper in which the five stars on China’s flag were replaced with coronavirus. While racist association of the virus with Chinese is an extremely reprehensible act, but China’s own record of treating its minorities (Uighurs, Tibetans,) and brutal suppression of Hongkongers demand for self-rule, the world did not heed China’s protests. Also cartoon is a trivial issues but they used it to stave off a vigorous internal debate about weaknesses of CPC and its accountability and transparency.
But beyond the political world, the virus and the consequent social isolation also affected our personal lives. We suddenly developed strange new habits. Social distancing threatened our entire sense-and training-of proximity. No handshakes, just waving from a distance, opening doors with feet, pressing the buttons of elevator with elbow, and repeatedly washing hands and mouths like OCD maniacs.
Pakistan’s embassy in Beijing is just a few minutes’ drive form my dorm. However it didn’t ask about our conditions. We asked our university to provide us with at least one mask each, but knowing the hard times China was passing through, we also requested our friends in Pakistan to donate us masks so that we may be of some help to Chinese people. They bought 500 masks, came to Chinese embassy in Islamabad and asked them if they could deliver as plights had by then halted. The embassy excused. But from the last few weeks, our university regularly gives us masks. Some departments of our university even sent food and other items to their students. Ours did not, however.
Now that China finally defeated the virus, but foreigners are bringing it back. So the university further fastened restriction on us. Now we are in complete quarantine form march 10. No more we can step out of the campus. A truck brings vegetables every week and we buy through the fence-wall of our university. The school authorities daily inundate us with rules/instructions of what not to do. Those students who are in their home countries are asked not to come to China and wait for the news.
But we have to pass this boring and dangerous time. I published a paper, read dozens of books and papers and cooked/burned many delicious foods. My friends are stuck to Netflix. When order, or put it this way, “meaning” suddenly disappears from daily routine, one feels disoriented. Our old machine has yet not absorbed the new software. We keep waking all the night while the day for us is night. Only once a week we see the sun, given if the sky is clear.
Meanwhile Imran khan did a great service to us. He stated that Pakistan is fighting the corona with faith (emaan ki taqat) and tigers. Now when Pakistani tigers ask us to send them masks and sanitizers, we remind them to strengthen your emaans. And since China does not have any emaan, we are relived of friends demands.
I hope the entire world, so steeped in wars, populist tribalism and deadening consumerism, will finally come together against the common enemy, and with science and reason, will thawrt the pandemic. Although, the economic shocks will reverberate for a long time to come.
Staring the serene moon from the window on a silent night over the equally silent city of Beijing at 4 AM, I wonder whether the residents of big cities, in Pakistan and elsewhere, will now realize how people live in lockdowns in the ex-FATA, Kashmir, Ghaza and elsewhere? Also whether the voters will realize which is more essential: hospitals or tanks and missiles?
Also Read: A Letter to Maulana Tariq Jamil on Coronavirus
