Reports: Shanghai Residents Trapped at Gunpoint in Coronavirus Quarantines

Shanghai’s coronavirus lockdown widened and intensified on Monday with no end in sight, even though citywide mass testing was supposedly completed on schedule with military assistance. Residents report armed police officers flooding the streets as the public grows more angry and desperate.

“The armed police came on March 28 and 29, and there are a lot of armed police around right now. They had been keeping a low profile, but they are much more open since vice premier Sun Chunlan arrived here,” a Shanghai resident named Feng told Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Monday.

“Those of us who live near the airport were kept up all night because the rumbling sound from the military transports was so loud, and there were also helicopters flying constantly back and forth overhead,” Feng added. 

Another correspondent, an academic named Zhang Jin, told RFA there were “special police with guns” stationed outside his restless downtown community.

“They’re afraid there’ll be some kind of incident in Shanghai, which would be a big deal, so they’ve been brought in to keep order,” Zhang said.

Zhang doubted his government’s “dynamic zero-Covid” policies would be able to contain Shanghai’s omicron outbreak, an attitude evidently shared by a growing number of residents, especially after leaked audio recordings of local health officials revealed the hospital system is overwhelmed and decisions are being made on purely political grounds.

“They are now writing down people’s positive tests as negative,” a Shanghai health official said in a leaked audio clip. “Our professionals and experts are being driven crazy because nobody is listening to what they have to say. This pandemic has become a political disease, consuming so much manpower, material and financial resources.”

Shanghai’s lockdown was extended on Tuesday to cover all 26 million residents in every quarter of the city, even though only 268 symptomatic cases have been officially recognized. Earlier talk of briefly locking parts of the city down in stages, so its vital industrial and financial operations could continue with minimal disruption, has been abandoned.

“As a growing number of members of the public shared comments and videos across social media expressing frustration with the blanket lockdown, authorities showed no sign of wavering,” Reuters noted.

The authorities do show signs of reverting to standard Communist procedure and forcibly silencing criticism. Reuters noticed that a petition to stop forcibly separating asymptomatic children who test positive for coronavirus from their parents vanished without a trace from WeChat after accumulating over a thousand signatures.

At least one prominent critic of the Shanghai lockdown has mysteriously disappeared: disease prevention expert Zhang Wenhong, hailed only a few months ago as “China’s Dr. Fauci” and “Daddy Zhang.”

Zhang’s viral videos were shared approvingly by Chinese state media, winning him over 4 million followers on Weibo, China’s version of banned Twitter – but in late March, he used that enormous social media platform to criticize “dynamic zero-Covid” policies, and that was the last thing he said in public.

“In the future pandemic fight, maintaining normal life should be placed in a position of equal importance with (virus screening). We hope that we can minimize the impact on our lives as much as possible,” Zhang said on March 23, noting that Shanghai’s medical system was growing “strained” as coronavirus cases accumulated.

Zhang’s critical post was shared over two million times in a matter of hours, apparently catching the malevolent attention of Communist officials. Previously a fixture in Shanghai public health press conferences, he was replaced without explanation on March 28 and has not been seen in public since.   

All of RFA’s contacts in Shanghai spoke of a food crisis looming over the city as inventories dwindle. Chinese Communist officials imposed the lockdown with very little warning, as they usually do, so there was no chance to build up stockpiles of food, medicine, and other essential goods. 

Few arrangements were made for resupply, possibly because Communist officials believed their own hype about the lockdown lasting only a few days. Among other logistical obstacles, trucking companies are reportedly afraid to send shipments into Shanghai because the trucks might not be allowed to leave after they make their deliveries.

The UK Guardian on Tuesday quoted messages of growing “confusion, chaos, and hopelessness” from Shanghai social media, with many complaining about their government’s “lack of organization and preparation.”

Residents took to social media to complain they are running out of food and cannot buy groceries, either in person or through delivery services. Others said the sudden lockdown left them without supplies of medicine for ailments such as diabetes. 

“Over the last few days, numerous mobile phone footage that showed residents protesting against confusing lockdown messaging and being unable to buy daily necessities have been circulating online. In one video, several residents in a housing compound shouted: ‘We want to eat, we want to go to work, we want to have the right to know.’ The footage has been taken down by censors,” the Guardian reported.