Shanghai lockdown and alienation under China’s state capitalism

The chaotic implementation of lockdown measures in Shanghai in the spring of 2022 generated widespread feelings of anxiety, frustration, and despair among residents from different rungs of socioeconomic strata. This article archives and analyzes personal narratives mostly by educated middle-class urbanites to understand how they made sense of their being during the lockdown and probes the social conditions structuring these feelings and the subsequent pall of silence. It argues that the Shanghai lockdown is not an exceptional event but a crystalizing moment of a generalized condition of alienation under state capitalism that has been gradually taking hold on Chinese society. Nor can the loss of control over one’s world under the extreme conditions of lockdown be solely attributed to coercion and manipulation by external forces. By employing alienation as an interpretive scheme, this article reveals the complex and often subtle ways in which people became both victims and perpetrators of their alienated condition.