The author is a media professional living in Shanghai. At 8:21 p.m. on March 27, Shanghai authorities announced that Pudong would go into lockdown starting at 5 a.m. the next morning, to be followed by a four-day lockdown of Puxi after Pudong's scheduled reopening. The author immediately sensed that this lockdown would not last just four days, but would turn into something akin to the Wuhan-style lockdown. Without hesitation, he booked a flight to Hainan.
"Many people think I was incredibly lucky to have avoided experiencing any of the lockdowns that hit Shanghai during the transition from winter to spring. But what I want to say is that luck had very little to do with my escape. What mattered most was that I simply couldn't bring myself to passively accept, obediently comply with, or even actively participate in what I saw as a social experiment—one that defied science, contradicted democratic values, and violated the basic moral bottom line of humanity."