The Legacies of Lockdown: Moral Logics of Exchange and Mistrust in Postpandemic China

When Shanghai entered an extended lockdown under China's Zero‐COVID policy in spring 2022, residents found themselves confined within their residential compounds, cut off from conventional supply chains, and dependent on improvised systems of local provisioning and state rationing. From the perspective of economic anthropology, such conditions might be expected to foster cooperation and exchange that could build durable social ties, but this article shows that while community‐based provisioning generated widespread empathy and situational cooperation, it did not produce enduring forms of solidarity. Integrating Graeber's concept of the moral logics of exchange with Carey's and Hansen et al.'s theorizations of mistrust, I argue that local exchange and sharing were structured by episodic mistrust: forms of coordination grounded in ongoing, interaction‐specific assessments of reliability rather than in stable trust. By contrast, state provisioning, though often opaque and uneven, was experienced through a more generalized, dispositional mistrust that coexisted with continued dependence and reinforced the party‐state's centrality in crisis management. These findings show how mistrust operates within and across distinct moral logics of exchange, shaping not only how goods circulate but also the kinds of social relations such circulation makes possible.