Coping with stress as a collective?: Residents learning to engage in community affairs during the Shanghai lockdown

Abstract

During Shanghai’s two-month lockdown in 2022, residential community members coped with stress collectively. For many, this experience of intensive community engagement was a learning process with regard to the deliberation of community affairs and collective problem-solving. This article explores how an embryonic sense of collectivity manifested in the expression of shared and solitary sentiments in community engagement and how this collective sense easily fractured during concrete community deliberation and collective decision-making. Despite problems common to collective action, these residents’ barriers to community engagement were largely shaped by extant government policy and grassroots institutional structure, sparking conflicts, cynicism, and mistrust, as evidenced by their narratives.