By the eighth week of Beijing's lockdown, many sectors of the city were clearly back to normal, as you can see from the pictures below, but many other sectors – often more important in economic terms – were still far from normal. The social terror and widespread feelings of...

...gloom and pessimism that were common a 5-6 weeks ago in China have evaporated, and will evaporate soon enough in in most other countries, and with them, the dread and suspicion people feel towards their neighbors will also go away, but, as we are seeing in China, these...

...could easily be replaced by rising racist and anti-foreign feelings and this, I suspect, will only get worse as the economic impact of Covid-19 settles in and as governments increasingly try to shift the blame for their mismanagement onto foreigners.

I went out again today...

...to do my bi-weekly food shopping, and outside my hutong it really felt like life was back to normal. Beijing traffic measures today were way below last week’s levels, but we are still in the Qing Ming Jie holiday period, and most people didn’t go to work, so that would...

...explain less traffic, but it still seemed brisk to me. There were people lining up to get into a local food shop (see left), something I hadn’t seen since January, and at the famous chestnut shop on the corner of my hutong it was almost like old times (see right), with 19...

...people in line waiting to place their orders.

The subway wasn’t as crowded as it was last week, but given that it was a holiday, it was more crowded than I would have expected. There were 34 people in my subway car, less than the 48 people on Friday, but still quite a lot...

...for a non-working day.

When I got to Sanlitun it was absolutely packed with people, with 29 customers in Starbucks (left) in the downstairs area and line of 9 people in line ahead of me. Still, except for cafes and food places, and of course the Apple store (right), where...

...there was a line of people waiting to get in, it seemed that almost all the shops were still mostly empty of customers, even though the shopping malls had quite a lot of people.

By a pleasant coincidence I got a call from Chen Long, a former student of mine who is...

...now a partner with the Plenum Group, one of my favorite Chinese research groups, and after I had completed my shopping we agreed to meet up to go to one of the local bars to grab a drink. This turned out to be much harder than we expected because each bar or restaurant was...

...only allowed to accept a limited number of customers, and so although none was close to full, we still weren’t able to get in without having to wait. We finally found an out-of-the-way place that had 13 customers but was allowed 15, and so we got in just under the limit...

...All performance spaces in Beijing – theater, music, movies – are still closed in Beijing, but I was surprised to hear from one of my musician friends earlier today that in Hangzhou and Chengdu the music live-houses are open for business and maybe even doing shows. The owner...

...of School Bar, the most important underground music club in Beijing, invited me last week to their re-opening next week, but he told me that they are only open for drinks: they still cannot do live music shows and have no date as to when they will be allowed to do so. The...

...rules in Beijing have become much stricter than elsewhere.

Given the huge numbers congregating in different parts of China, I think in the next two weeks we are going to discover whether the gradual re-opening of China will result in a second wave of infections. We...

...are all desperately hoping that it won’t, but of course we can’t really know for another 2-3 weeks. Until then, we can only keep our fingers crossed and hope the good weather helps.