Such traffic has come to an almost complete halt.

With the pandemic going largely unchecked in Myanmar, last year Chinese officials began putting up spans of sheet metal, barracks for guards and fences topped with razor wire along the boundary with Muse – structures the mayor dubbed a “Steel Great Wall”.

Coronavirus in China: ‘No timeline’ for exit from zero-Covid controls

Mandatory testing has been so frequent that, according to one Chinese news site, a baby there was swabbed six dozen times before his first birthday.

Like most Chinese cities, Ruili (pronounced “ray-lee”) has officially recorded precious few deaths from Covid-19. Stamping out the virus has been a genuine public-health achievement, but it has come at a major economic and social cost.

On a recent visit, boarded-up storefronts lined many streets, idle construction sites baked in the subtropical sun, and jade markets, the city’s best-known tourist attraction, had far more merchants than customers.

There has been no indication of when – or if – the border will reopen.

Although Ruili’s pandemic policies have been extreme, they have been in line with mainland China’s overall posture.

Barring a change of heart or an end to the pandemic, that means the 1.4 billion people Xi rules will have to adapt to indefinite constraints on trade and travel, and to be prepared for further lockdowns.

Already, severe restrictions on movement are becoming commonplace, with recent lockdowns targeting Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu, among dozens of other cities.

Amy Gadsden, associate vice-provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, and a former special adviser on China to the US Department of State, says the moves in places such as Ruili reflect a long history of local party officials striving to be exemplars of policy implementation, regardless of the efficacy and costs of their actions.

“The pandemic has crystallised and resurrected patterns of political and social engagement that have deep roots in Communist China,” she says. Zero-Covid “has offered a stark reminder of the party state’s ability to intervene in citizens’ lives in absolute and even cruel ways”.

The border’s fluidity still shapes life in Ruili today. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, some 50,000 Myanmar citizens were officially registered to live in the city, though this was almost certainly an undercount.

Chinese authorities have never condoned illegal crossings, but nor have they done much to stop them, likely in part because many businesses in Ruili depend on cheap Myanmese labour.

The border’s fluidity also shaped the pandemic’s course in Ruili.

On a cloudy morning in September 2020, a woman identified in government releases only by her surname, Yang, set off from Muse with her three children and two nannies to visit her sister in Ruili. Although the national border had been closed to travellers since the end of March, Yang was able to easily cross the city’s namesake Ruili River, entering China.

Chinese officials were at the time taking considerable pride in having contained Covid-19 after the initial outbreak in Wuhan. As official propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, they had protected their population while Europe and the US recorded deaths in the hundreds of thousands.

After Yang tested positive, the Ruili government swung into emergency mode. Officials set up checkpoints around the city, barring anyone from leaving or entering. All residents of its central districts were ordered to stay home while the entire population was tested. The testing campaign turned up only a single other infected person – one of the nannies travelling with Yang – and the lockdown was lifted.

In the aftermath of the Yang case, Ruili authorities built a fence along the stretch of border that was in their jurisdiction, but they emphasised that it was a temporary structure, to be removed once the situation was determined to be safe.

They also allowed the primary checkpoint for goods coming from Myanmar to stay open, maintaining supplies of timber, jade and farm produce important to the regional economy.

Ruili reported its next Covid-19 case six months later, in late March 2021. Like Yang, the infected person was a citizen of Myanmar. (It isn’t clear whether the individual, who was not identified, had crossed into China legally.)

Gong’s replacement, Zhai Yulong, increased virus-control spending sixfold, raising it to 2.12 billion yuan (US$294 million) for all of 2021. In the 12 months to April 2022, the city imposed six more lockdowns, at least four of them linked to cases among Myanmese nationals.

Businesses such as electronics stores and car-repair shops remained shut for a year, along with schools, while all shipments from Myanmar were halted and orders were given to build the border wall.

During a visit in early August, local government staff tagged along almost everywhere, an indication of how sensitive Covid policies have become. They were present during most of the interviews conducted for this article, and though they did not interfere, it’s hard to know how their presence might have affected what people said.

At the Daxing Supermarket, one of the city’s largest grocers, manager Qiu Meizhi said she had kept coming in to work throughout the lockdowns, noting with pride that the store, a branch of a regional chain, had refrained from raising its prices.

Chinese lockdowns have been far more restrictive than anything attempted in Western countries, with residents not allowed to leave their homes for any reason apart from mandatory testing. Ruili officials were particularly enthusiastic enforcers of those rules.

Restaurants and small food markets were shut down, with groceries available only through deliveries from large retailers such as Daxing. Qiu and her staff typically filled as many as 500 orders a day. During the most difficult stretches, she said, she received periodic calls from customers claiming to be completely out of food.

In October 2021, a former deputy mayor of Ruili, Dai Rongli, published a blog post titled “Ruili Needs the Mother Country’s Love”. In it, he argued that, because of its position on the border, the city was bearing a disproportionate burden in keeping the virus out of China.

In a subsequent television interview, Dai said that some of his ex-colleagues in the municipal government were so overwhelmed with preventing infections that they hadn’t been home for months.

Dai’s statements were the first many Chinese citizens had heard of the situation in Ruili, and they prompted an outpouring of sympathy on social media, with commenters expressing shock at the extent of lockdowns and testing there.

It was a rare barometer of the national popularity of zero-Covid policies in a country where opinion polls are heavily restricted. (In a statement issued the day after Dai’s blog post was published, the Ruili city government said his descriptions of the situation were out of date. He did not respond to requests for comment.)

Gross domestic product barely rose in the second quarter, and youth unemployment has hovered near a record 20 per cent. Immigration consultants have reported a boom in business, as wealthy residents seek to move abroad.

National officials have taken steps in recent months to cut quarantine times, promote spending and investment, and punish local bureaucrats for overzealous enforcement, but these measures have amounted to only minor tweaks.

Hospitals are under-resourced, especially outside big cities, and a large outbreak would severely strain the healthcare system.

In an analysis published in May by Nature Medicine, researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai estimated that, with almost no natural immunity in the population, if the Omicron variant were to spread in China without mass testing and lockdowns, it could result in as many as 1.6 million deaths.

A viral catastrophe on that scale would severely test the reputation for administrative competence that the Communist Party has placed at the core of its political pitch since the 1990s.

Everbright Headwear, which supplies hats bearing the logos of the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys, and other teams to US-based New Era Cap, opened a factory in Ruili in 2019. The company was following an increasingly common path for Chinese manufacturers as wages rose and the working-age population was constrained by the legacy of the one-child policy, in force from 1980 to 2015.

Hiring had been difficult in Jiangsu, the heavily industrialised province where Everbright has its headquarters, but in Ruili the company could employ large numbers of Myanmese workers who were in China legally.

It could house them in on-site dormitories and pay them about US$450 a month, half of what a Chinese employee would demand.

The plan, says factory manager Chen Xile, was to expand the plant from 400 staff to more than 1,000, who would account for 40 per cent of Everbright’s production capacity. (The company sometimes fills custom orders for top athletes, among other services; Chen can recall LeBron James’ head size from memory.) But the pandemic and the border closure brought attrition.

When workers returned to Myanmar, whether to visit family or, in some instances, because a loved one had been killed in the country’s ongoing civil conflict, they couldn’t return. By August 11, Everbright was down to fewer than 300 personnel, leaving Chen desperate for replacements.

He jokes that his staffing policy now amounted to: “If you’re human, you’re hired.”

Ruili locals didn’t appear to have much interest in making hats for relatively low wages, forcing Everbright to move much of its production abroad, to Haiti and Laos. Its factory in Laos, which opened in 2021, has grown to 4,000 workers and is now the company’s main production base.

“We’d rather be in China,” Chen says. But access to labour was crucial. “It’s all about volume. If you can’t get volume up, everything is hard.”

Apart from manufacturing, Ruili’s economy revolves largely around jade. Myanmar is by far the largest jade producer in the world, and Ruili is the traditional conduit for shipments heading north.

At the Duo Bao Zhi Cheng market, Ruili’s largest for jade jewellery, many merchants were already shifting their operations at least partially online before the pandemic, part of a broader transformation for the social-media age.

See a bracelet you like? Text the host any questions you may have and then haggle for a better price, perhaps inspiring some theatrical shouting. Jade sales have the added appeal of being streamed from crowded, lively markets, providing local colour that some buyers find irresistible.

One of the sellers at Duo Bao Zhi Cheng, who would give only his surname, Li, says he started with a traditional jade stall. Then his daughter tried running some live-stream sales during her summer break from vocational school.

The money she made in a month was enough to persuade her to drop out and for her father not to stop her. In 2019, they sold as much as 100,000 yuan of jade per day, 70 per cent of it online.

In the spring of 2021, Ruili officials shut down the jade market, fearful that live-stream sessions, which can attract dense groups of spectators, would spread Covid-19. Live-streaming from home was impractical, not least because of the difficulty of sending orders to customers from locked-down apartment buildings, and the trade more or less shut down for more than a year.

The government also halted cross-border shipments, insisting, contrary to scientific consensus, that Covid-19 can be spread on the surfaces of consumer products.

The jade market reopened only on April 28 this year, and cross-border shipments have resumed in small volumes. “When they said the market was reopening, I was so excited,” Li recalls. “I’d been sitting at home for a year.” He was hopeful he would soon get back to pre-pandemic levels of business.

But for everyone in Ruili, as in the country beyond, normality is precarious. It took just a single positive test for the government to initiate the September lockdown, which covered about half the city.

For the time being, China’s leaders are willing to pay the high price of zero-Covid, and citizens have no choice but to go along. A 32-year-old jade dealer, one of the few Ruili residents interviewed without supervision by officials, is fatalistic.

Whenever the virus appears again, he says, he plans to do what the government tells him. There’s no other choice, he says, and no point worrying about a future over which he has no control.

“Ruili is now the safest place in China,” he asserts, half-joking, “because we stopped everything.”