For China’s Halloween of Discontent, He Went as a Surveillance Camera Favorite 

Several nights of Halloween celebration in Shanghai provided a vivid, if indirect, commentary this week on the malaise gripping the world’s second-largest economy.

Nearly a year after protests roiled major Chinese cities in opposition to leader Xi Jinping’s stringent zero-Covid policies, ghostly figures in white hazmat suits haunted sidewalks, threatening passersby with a new round of nasal Covid swabs. A walking stock-market chart floated through the throng, its downward slope a harbinger of terrifying losses to come. A long dead writer rose from the grave to warn of a nation losing its way.

Thousands of decked-out revelers have poured into downtown Shanghai over the past few nights to celebrate the first post-Covid Halloween, with large teams of police keeping watch, according to local residents. While most costume choices have been innocuous, some have resounded with subtle political defiance.

Video footage and images posted on Chinese social-media platforms showed several people assuming the personas of white-clad functionaries administering the Covid tests that became emblematic of pandemic controls that left an indelible mark on many.

At least three photos circulating on social-media platforms captured a woman draped in sheets of blank paper, a potent symbol of resistance against censorship that came to the forefront during the Covid protests. In one of the photos, a person in a hazmat suit is seen thrusting an oversize cotton swab in her face.

Video footage showed a man attired as the venerable Chinese writer Lu Xun, known for political critiques a century ago that early Communist Party leaders embraced but which in recent years have at times been censored because they can now sound like criticism of today’s China. Before police intervened, the man recited Lu’s message for young people to speak out and displayed one of his most famous quotes—“Studying medicine won’t save Chinese people”—a call for meaningful political and societal change that still resonates in contemporary China.

Participants said police officers were largely restrained, but they occasionally removed participants whose costumes were overtly political or who drew large crowds with their antics.

In a striking video posted on social media, a person dressed up as Batman was tailed by scores of police officers as he strode down the street.

One of China’s wealthiest cities, Shanghai has borne the brunt of some of the country’s biggest recent struggles. A sudden and harsh Covid lockdown in the city last year led to a panic over food supplies and eroded local trust in the Communist Party. Since then, a sharp slowdown in the country’s once galloping economy and skyrocketing youth unemployment have leached away much of the optimism that once helped make the city a financial powerhouse.

“Each costume is a form of response to real life,” Shanghai-based columnist Lian Qingchuan wrote in a commentary published on the website of Hong Kong-based Phoenix New Media. “What can’t be said in words is expressed with the costumes.”

“Young people are under too much stress from competition and need an outlet,” said Leilya Wang, a Shanghai resident who stayed out past midnight on Tuesday taking in the scene.

Wang said she saw one person who had draped himself in a chart showing the Shanghai Composite Index plummeting in value—a scary proposition in a country with few means for families to invest, especially as a property boom collapses.

Social-media posts showed someone else strolling the streets in a white suit jacket and an oversize surveillance camera covering their head—a nod to the ubiquitous digital tracking that helped authorities keep the city under lockdown during the pandemic.

Images of some of the more trenchant costumes were censored online but preserved on X, formerly Twitter, through the account of Li Ying, a social-media figure known to his followers as Teacher Li. In last year’s nationwide Covid protests, he became a one-man news hub, reposting images sent to him by people across China.

“Halloween is a way for everyone to blow off steam,” Li said, adding that most costumes he saw in photos and videos weren’t overtly political. “Everyone is acting out their own reality.”

Summer Wu, a 23-year-old recent college graduate who majored in international trade, applied zombielike makeup and draped herself in copies of her résumé. “This is me cosplaying my recent life—interviews every day without any job offers,” she wrote on her account on short-video platform Douyin, describing a video she posted of her costume.

Many of the costumes were merely meant to entertain. Roy Sun, a local resident who ventured out into the city on Tuesday night, recalled seeing people dressed as concubines, Buddhist nuns and characters from popular TV shows. “Halloween with Chinese characteristics,” he called the street scenes from Shanghai.

In a social-media commentary, Shanghai’s official newspaper Jiefang Daily posted images of people dressed up as TV characters and other celebrities, saying the city deserves to have such a celebration.

The authorities on Wednesday told local residents in a statement that their party had ended for this year, and sent police to clear any revelers in the areas that were packed the previous nights.