In a replay of scenes from across Covid-zero China, viral videos appeared on Monday showing visitors rushing to the theme park’s locked gates in a bid to escape the lockdown. It followed extraordinary scenes over the weekend, with workers escaping en masse from a shuttered Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou to walk hundreds of kilometers to their hometowns. The Disney resort, which includes Disneyland and shopping areas, announced shortly after 11.30am that it was closing the theme park and surrounding areas immediately in compliance with Covid regulations. On WeChat, the Shanghai government said all people were banned from entering or leaving the park, and those still inside must be tested and show a negative result before being allowed to leave. Anyone who had visited the park since Oct. 27 should be tested for the virus three times in three days, it said. Videos shared on social media showed people crowding around the park’s gates. A video showed an employee telling trapped visitors that shops and entertainment were still open inside the park and would update them if there were any updates as a colleague locked the gate behind him. The park was also closed for two days last November with more than 30,000 visitors stranded inside after authorities ordered everyone to undergo checks. China’s commitment to contain and control any outbreak has led to massive suspension lockdowns of sites ranging from individual buildings to entire counties. Movement in cities and provinces has been restricted, with hundreds of millions under lockdown and an estimated hundreds of thousands of people sent to a regional quarantine center because they are infected, a close contact or a relatively distant neighbor. Shanghai reported just 10 local cases on Saturday. China reported 479 confirmed cases and more than 2,200 asymptomatic cases nationwide on Monday. The two high-profile lockdowns were the latest signs of growing discontent among some Chinese with the increasingly disruptive restrictions suddenly imposed in places across the country, sometimes because of just a handful of cases. Social media posts in recent months have depicted scores of shoppers and office workers fleeing buildings, sometimes overwhelming security to escape before being locked inside. Apple supplier Foxconn has not disclosed the number of infected workers, nor the number who have left, but said on Sunday it would not stop them from leaving after hundreds of workers on Saturday appeared to begin leaving the world’s largest iPhone factory, some by climbing the fences to escape. The Taiwan-based manufacturer has about 200,000 people at the Zhengzhou complex, which includes dormitories for workers. The mass departures came amid reports of fear of the outbreak and complaints of poor living conditions and inadequate Covid responses, two weeks after a “closed loop” system was put into operation. Local officials on Monday rejected claims that conditions were unsustainable and that the company had arranged transport for those who wanted to go home. The official also said the situation was now under control and production was continuing, but one of the insiders told Reuters there were fears the factory’s iPhone output could drop by 30 percent next month. The exodus prompted nearby cities to draw up plans to isolate migrant workers returning to their cities. In a show of support, residents along nearby travel routes left bottled water and supplies by roadsides with signs such as: “for Foxconn workers returning home,” according to social media posts. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “Some people were walking among wheat fields with their luggage, blankets and quilts,” one WeChat user wrote in a post on the social media images. “I couldn’t help but feel sad.” Many residents had hoped the zero-Covid policy could be relaxed after last week’s Communist Party congress, the most important meeting of China’s five-year political cycle. Instead, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, reiterated his commitment to dealing with the pandemic for the foreseeable future. The policy has been damaging to China’s economy and social fabric, but health experts and Chinese officials have said the spread of the virus among its 1.4 billion people would be catastrophic, with potentially hundreds of millions of deaths. There is little prior infection in China, large numbers of elderly remain unvaccinated and the health system is geographically inequitable and could not cope, they said. Additional research by Xiaoqian Zhu
