The Art of Surviving Lockdown: Neighborhood Governance in Shanghai During Spring 2022

China impressed the world with its success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Many scholars attribute China’s success to its particular mode of neighborhood governance, which effectively mobilized the mass to implement strict surveillance and quarantine. However, despite the growing attention to neighborhood governance, many scholars tend to solely credit the government and neglect individual residents’ agency, thus perpetuating the myth of an omnipotent Chinese government. This article challenges previous scholars’ assumptions by examining a crisis scenario—the lockdown of Shanghai from March to June 2022—where the local government’s ability to surveil and micro-manage individual residents was significantly hampered. Through semi-structured interviews with eighteen residents who experienced the lockdown, it probes into the spontaneous efforts made by Shanghai residents to address the most pressing challenge confronting them—supply shortages. It shows that these grassroots initiatives played a critical role in the success of China’s dynamic zero-COVID policy during the lockdown period.