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Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family\\u2019s New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks and hand sanitisers we\\u2019d ordered.\\xa0

Mercifully, Covid didn\\u2019t come up at all as we welcomed the Year of the Rabbit this weekend, though my family in China are still recovering from their recent infections. The zero Covid phase of the pandemic is well and truly over.

So what better time to reflect on the rollercoaster of the last three years? In exchange for controlling the virus, China\\u2019s borders were shut for most of that time, while the economy has tanked and a general of children had their schooling disrupted. Yet after some remarkable protests last November, the country has opened up at a breakneck pace.

The government is now keen to move on, focusing now on this year\\u2019s economic recovery. But can a country of 1.4 billion people move on quite so quickly? The exceptional nature of the pandemic and the collective trauma of the last three years need to be processed, and yet I wouldn\\u2019t say that the Chinese Communist Party is usually good at allowing people to come to terms with historical suffering, especially when it\\u2019s the Party at fault\\u2026

So on this episode we\\u2019ll be looking at the social legacy of the pandemic on China, and the collective memory of this exceptional time.

Joining me are the Financial Times\\u2019s Yuan Yang, who was the paper\\u2019s deputy Beijing bureau chief during the first two years of the pandemic, and Guobin Yang, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Wuhan Lockdown, a book looking at how the Wuhan people documented the world\\u2019s first brush with Covid-19.
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\\nOn the episode I also mentioned the Chinese Whispers episode on the civil backlash against facial recognition. Listen here.