An interesting read -- there is increasing evidence that the entire concept of "lockdown" was Chinese propaganda designed to sow extreme social and economic discord in the West.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda
This is a bunch of conspiratorial hokum.
I have friends and family in China and my DH was there during the height of the outbreak (arrived Jan 13, departed Feb 27). The lockdown absolutely was real, and effective. In his city I think they only had 23 cases diagnosed by the time he left, most of whom had travelled through or had contact with people from Wuhan. Those people were identified publicly, with details of every public location they had visited before diagnosis shared. Flight numbers, whether they took a bus (with time and route number noted) or taxi (with taxi registration number and start and end poits of the journey noted. If they went to a bank, a grocery store, a clinic -- all of that information and arrival and departure times were publicized (all of this presumably traced through cell phone data). Starting from around January 23 my inlaws apartment complex required each household to have a single pass that could be used once per day by one member of the household to go out and get essentials. Exit and entry times and destiationswere recorded. Masks and gloves were required.
My niece returned from France, where her university was having a bad outbreak) in mid-March and was immediately ushered into a 14-day quarantine at a local hotel.
Maybe it was overdoing it but China got the disease in check relatively quickly. It probably helped a lot that schools were already on break for the lunar new year holiday and simply did not reopen.
