As the troubled lockdown in Xi’an has shown, many Chinese people remain willing to work diligently toward the government’s goal of eliminating the virus, no matter the consequences.

The Xi’an government was quick and resolute in imposing a strict lockdown in late December when cases were on the rise.

The tragedies in Xi’an have prompted some Chinese people to question how those enforcing the quarantine rules can behave like this and to ask who holds ultimate responsibility.

“It’s very easy to blame the individuals who committed the banality of evil,” a user called @IWillNotResistIt wrote on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.

Now, with patients dying of non-Covid diseases, residents going hungry and officials pointing fingers, the lockdown in Xi’an has shown how the country’s political apparatus has ossified, bringing a ruthlessness to its single-minded pursuit of a zero-Covid policy.

Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, is in a much better position than Wuhan in early 2020, when thousands of people died of the virus, overwhelming the city’s medical system.

The city’s health code system, which is used to track people and enforce quarantines, collapsed under heavy use.

Three men were caught while escaping from Xi’an to the countryside, possibly to avoid the high costs of the lockdown.

A deputy director-level official at a government agency in Beijing lost his position last week after some social media users reported that an article he wrote about the lockdown in Xi’an contained untruthful information.

In the article, he called the lockdown measures “inhumane” and “cruel.” It bore the headline “The Sorrow of Xi’an Residents: Why They Ran Away From Xi’an at the Risk of Breaking the Law and Death.”.

Red, the social media platform, censored a post by the daughter of the man who died of a heart attack because “it contained negative information about the society,” according to a screenshot on her account.

In Xi’an, there is no author like Fang Fang writing her Wuhan lockdown diary, no citizen journalists Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin or Zhang Zhan posting videos.

The only widely circulated, in-depth article about the Xi’an lockdown was written by the former journalist Zhang Wenmin, a Xi’an resident known by her pen name, Jiang Xue.

Her article has since been deleted, and state security officers have warned her not to speak further on the matter, according to a person close to her.

A few Chinese publications that had written excellent investigative articles out of Wuhan didn’t send reporters to Xi’an because they couldn’t secure passes to walk freely under lockdown, according to people familiar with the situation.

The Xi’an lockdown debacle hasn’t seemed to persuade many people in China to abandon the country’s no-holds-barred approach to pandemic control.