The lockdown of Guo Jing’s neighborhood in Wuhan — the city at the heart of China’s COVID-19 outbreak — came suddenly and without warning.
Unable to go out, the 29-year-old is now sealed inside her compound where she has to depend on online group-buying services to get food.
“Living for at least another month isn’t an issue,” Guo said, explaining that she had her own stash of pickled vegetables and salted eggs.
However, what scares her most is the lack of control — first, the entire city was sealed off, and then residents were limited to exiting their compound once every three days.
Now even that has been taken away.
Guo is among about 11 million residents of Wuhan, Hubei Province, that has been under effective quarantine since Jan. 23 as Chinese authorities race to contain the outbreak.
Since then, its people have faced a number of tightening controls over daily life as the death toll from the coronavirus swelled, but new rules this month barring residents from leaving their neighborhoods are the most restrictive yet — and for some, threaten their livelihoods.
“I still don’t know where to buy things once we’ve finished eating what we have at home,” said Pan Hongsheng, who lives with his wife and two children.
Some neighborhoods have organized group-buying services, where supermarkets deliver orders in bulk, but in Pan’s community, “no one cares.”
“The three-year-old doesn’t even have any milk powder left,” Pan said, adding that he has been unable to send medicine to his in-laws — both in their 80s — as they live in a different area.
“I feel like a refugee,” he said.
The “closed management of neighborhoods is bound to bring some inconvenience to the lives of the people,” Hubei Chinese Communist Party Committee Vice Secretary Qian Yuankun (錢遠坤) said last week at a news conference.
Demand for group food delivery services has rocketed with the new restrictions, with supermarkets and neighborhood committees scrambling to fill orders.
Most group-buying services operate through Chinese messaging app WeChat, which has chat groups for meat, vegetables and milk — and even “hot dry noodles,” a famous Wuhan dish.
More sophisticated shops and compounds have their own mini-app inside WeChat, where residents can choose packages priced by weight before orders are sent in bulk to grocery stores.
In Guo’s neighborhood, for instance, a 6.5kg set of five vegetables costs 50 yuan (US$7.11).
“You have no way to choose what you like to eat,” Guo said. “You cannot have personal preferences anymore.”
The group-buying model is also more difficult for smaller communities to adopt, as supermarkets have minimum order requirements for delivery.
“To be honest, there’s nothing we can do,” said Yang Nan, manager of Lao Cun Zhang supermarket, which requires a minimum of 30 orders.
“We only have four cars,” she said, explaining that the store did not have the staff to handle smaller orders.
Another supermarket said that it capped its daily delivery load to 1,000 orders per day.
“Hiring staff is difficult,” said Wang Xiuwen, who works at the store’s logistics division, adding that it is wary about hiring too many outsiders for fear of infection.
Closing off communities has split the city into silos, with different neighborhoods rolling out controls of varying intensity.
In some compounds, residents have easier access to food — albeit a smaller selection than normal — and one woman said that her family pays delivery drivers to run grocery errands.
Her compound has not been sealed off either, the 24-year-old said on condition of anonymity, though they are limited to one person leaving at a time.
Some districts have implemented their own rules, such as prohibiting supermarkets from selling to individuals, forcing neighborhoods to buy in bulk or not at all.
“In the neighborhood where I live, the reality is really terrible,” said David Dai, who lives on the outskirts of Wuhan.
Though his apartment complex has organized group-buying, Dai said that residents were unhappy with price and quality.
“A lot of tomatoes, a lot of onions — they were already rotten,” he said, estimating that more than one-third of the food had to be thrown away.
His family must “totally depend” on themselves, added the 49-year-old, who has resorted to saving and drying turnip skins to add nutrients to meals.
The uncertainty of not knowing when the controls would be lifted is also frustrating, said Ma Chen, a man in his 30s who lives alone.
“I have no way of knowing how much [food] I should buy,” Ma said.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
RSS