The art of survival: spontaneous organization and autonomous action among Shanghai residents during the COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract China impressed the world with its success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Many researchers have attributed China’s success to its hybrid mode of urban neighborhood governance, which could effectively mobilize residents to implement strict surveillance and quarantine measures for the state. However, despite their growing attention to urban neighborhood governance, they tend to privilege the government’s role while neglecting residents’ agency, thereby perpetuating the myth of an omnipresent and omnipotent Chinese state and reducing residents to passive objects of governance. This article challenges earlier researchers’ assumptions by exploring a crisis scenario – the lockdown of Shanghai from March to June 2022 – in which the local government’s capacity to surveil and micro-manage individual residents and deliver public services was significantly hampered. Through semi-structured interviews with eighteen individuals who experienced the lockdown in Shanghai, it examines the self-preserving efforts made by Shanghai residents to address the most serious challenge confronting them – supply shortages. It demonstrates that spontaneous organization and autonomous action among Shanghai residents were crucial to their survival during the crisis.