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Beijing (AFP) – Dining in clandestine restaurants, drinking in secret bars or hiding the symptoms of the covid: some residents in Beijing defy the strict anti-covid regulations that the Chinese authorities are beginning to relax.
“It was pretty hidden, you couldn’t see the lights on the second floor from the outside,” says a resident who visited a speakeasy hotpot restaurant.
The girl stumbled upon the joint on Xiaohongshu, the Chinese equivalent of Instagram, while searching for indoor dining places in Beijing.
When he went, it was “packed” with people. “I was very happy to eat out, but at the same time I felt like I had to fight underground,” says the woman who asked to remain anonymous.
China is at a turning point in its virus strategy after nearly three years mired in harsh restrictions that successfully contained initial outbreaks but caused public unrest.
After the biggest protests in the country in decades, several cities, including the capital, began to relax the requirement to present positive tests to enter certain places and the state media began to minimize the risks of the virus.
This relaxation led some residents to defy the rules. Publications of restaurants and cafes that serve indoors, something prohibited in a large part of the city, circulate on social networks with hundreds of “likes”.
An expat, who asked not to be named, told AFP that he recently enjoyed lamb stew and meat skewers at another clandestine venue.
“The workers wouldn’t let me in and said they only did takeout,” he explains. “But when I said my friends were already upstairs, they winked at me and asked me to scan the QR code” before entering.
“I can not take it anymore”
Another expat in Beijing admits watching a World Cup soccer match at a shuttered nightclub, which secretly broadcasts Qatar matches to invited attendees only by word of mouth.
After a labyrinthine route through a neighboring hotel and a car park, he arrived at the club, locked from the outside. Inside, customers discreetly watched the game without a mask.
“It was so surreal to go through so many filters,” he says.
A food blogger in Beijing, who recently posted about a secretly open bar, says people are fed up with the situation.
“I can’t take it anymore. I hope they reopen as soon as possible,” the blogger, surnamed Sui, told AFP.
Two of these residents also believe they contracted Covid-19 in recent days, in which they came down with fever and cough.
But they refused to undergo a PCR test that could have led them to be locked up or, even worse, sent to a quarantine center.
Some communities in the central Chaoyang district have quietly begun allowing some Covid-19 positive residents to self-isolate at home, in a major departure from China’s anti-pandemic playbook.
“It’s better to wait and recover at home” without undergoing a PCR test or going into public spaces, says one of the expats, admitting that he “felt a bit rebellious.”
“I really want to have Covid-19 to put an end to this. I have felt so fed up in the last two days,” a Beijing resident told AFP, who, in case of infection, would stay at home and wait to overcome the symptoms.
“I know that positive people can quarantine at home now. I don’t want the government to know if I have Covid or not,” he says.
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