Bureaucratic judgments hadn’t caught up with reality, as South Korea had long since passed its peak of cases, while Taiwan’s numbers at the time were increasingly rapidly-and were over 44,000 on the day I left-yet those arriving in Japan from Taiwan faced no quarantine, leading some South Koreans to argue intentional discrimination. There was a 10-day mandatory quarantine for all visitors to Taiwan and in Japan a three-day quarantine for arrivals from locales designated as high risk. If I couldn’t make it to China, I could get darn close, resume fieldwork and interviewing, and see firsthand how others look at China and the U.S.-China relationship.īut getting around Asia in the spring of 2022 was no picnic. Not ready to throw in the towel, I pivoted to Plan B and decided to go on a “friends tour” instead and visit Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Residents suffered tremendously, and one traveling friend, an American lawyer who made it to Shanghai just before the advisory was raised, ended up sitting in a hotel there for six weeks and then, unable to do anything or see anyone, turned around frustrated and went home. And it was a good thing I listened to them, as the Shanghai lockdown lasted two months.
Consulate’s nonessential personnel-because of the harsh lockdown in the city.Īs much as I wanted to board that flight, I ultimately followed the universal advice of friends and colleagues and made the painful decision not to. government issued a warning on April 8 advising against travel-and announcing the voluntary departure of the U.S. After an initial flight to San Francisco got caught up in the usual delays of personnel shortages and refueling, I was in the midst of taking my first of three PCR tests required to board my flight to Shanghai when the U.S. But I barely began my path through that daunting gantlet when my plans began to unravel. My destination was Beijing, but I had to go through San Francisco for a week of COVID-19 tests, then quarantine in Shanghai for three weeks, get approval to travel to Beijing, and then quarantine there for another two weeks. In an era when mutual isolation has left the Beijing-Washington relationship badly imbalanced, I still felt it was critical to go. The age of COVID-19 brought global air travel to a standstill for more than a year, and China’s zero-COVID policy has continued to make the country almost as hermetically sealed as its fellow communist neighbor North Korea, with international arrivals down almost 80 percent. It used to take only 15 hours and had become so regular that it felt like a short commute across town. It ended up taking 153 days to get from my home in Virginia to Beijing.
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