More than eight months after Covid-19 emerged in the industrial hub of 11 million, Wuhan is, perhaps more emphatically than anywhere else, moving into a post-virus future. As the club kids at Hepburn can attest, social life has resumed in all its varieties, with lineups at popular breakfast joints and cinemas and karaoke lounges open for business. Factories and offices are operating normally, although China’s vast surveillance state, partly re-tasked to monitoring public health, has a long reach. A national-ID number is required to purchase fever medicine, and anyone with a high temperature is theoretically required to report it to the authorities. Nightspots aside, people generally wear masks in public, and a system of check-ins has been implemented at most buildings, allowing rapid contact tracing should a case be detected.