Blog: This Is What It’s Like to Go Through Quarantine in China

Close to midnight at Auckland airport, a few masked passengers and staff moved past shuttered shops and restaurants, lost in their own thoughts, or in the glow of their phones. The passengers were furtive as we congregated to board, and entering the plane for Guangzhou, the anxiety was palpable.

During an intended short visit from Beijing, where I have been based since the mid-1980s, I became marooned for a year in my homeland and city of birth, Auckland. I strengthened bonds of family and friendship and experienced the uncommon community of New Zealanders facing Covid. New Zealand went into isolation, more out of fairness to the vulnerable few than fear of authority or becoming ill. Now I was returning to China, where my business partners had striven for a year to serve our clients, while maintaining each other’s morale in their own locked-down lives. Chinese people too complied with their government’s requirements, also out of a sense of unity rather than fear of authority, despite the cliches in the Western media that: “It is all right for China, it is a dictatorship.”