How internet services help Xian’s 13 million residents cope with Covid-19 lockdown in China
- Citizens are using WeChat mini-programs and chat groups to find food and supplies
- With people barred from leaving their homes, basic necessities are hard to come by
People in the Chinese city of Xian, which has been under lockdown since late December to contain the country’s worst community Covid-19 outbreak since 2020, are turning to the internet to help vulnerable citizens struggling to get food and other basic necessities.
While online food and grocery delivery services provided by Meituan and Ele.me – the country’s largest on-demand operators – remain operational in Xian, less tech-savvy elderly residents who are used to buying from physical stores have found it difficult to rely on these platforms.
Xian Catering, a company that operates a dozen restaurant chains in the city, decided to help out. On New Year’s Day, the e-commerce unit of the Shanghai-listed firm posted on its WeChat account, asking friends and families of senior citizens in the locked-down city to submit their contact information in a document-sharing mini-program called Tencent Docs.
Mini-programs are essentially tiny apps that users can access within WeChat. The feature allows third-party developers to quickly roll out new services that can be accessed by WeChat’s 1.26 billion users, 450 million of them daily active users of mini-programs last year, according to Tencent Holdings. In the first half of 2021, an estimated 3.4 million mini-programs existed on WeChat, according to research firm ALD.
WeChat’s vast network of mini-programs has enabled users to do much more during a crisis than their counterparts on Western social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, which are primarily used as platforms for communication and donations.
Just five days after Xian Catering posted on WeChat, the company received over 2,000 requests. In a follow-up post, the company shared photos and videos of employees meeting elderly people at the gates of neighbourhoods. It said it delivered groceries and meals to 204 households.
Elsewhere in the city, students at Xidian University have also found uses for the Tencent Docs mini-program. On the first day of the lockdown, they created a spreadsheet to crowdsource information on where people can get food and water on campus.
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