When a new virus first hit the Chinese city of Wuhan, the nation’s authorities did not have the luxury of ‘advance notice’. In the crucial early days of what was going to become one of the deadliest global pandemics in history – COVID-19 – the Chinese government obfuscated and censored important information, which did nothing to halt the contagion of this invisible enemy. It is now, months after the first case was officially reported,that the COVID-19 cases have completely dwindled down in China after an unparalleled, draconian yet systematic “lockdown” of millions of its citizens. The Chinese lockdown was accompanied by measures like forcibly removing people exposed to or infected with the coronavirus and putting them into isolation centres, shutting down public transportation, high–tech surveillance that helped ensure compliance with mass quarantines, etc.