Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan was dispatched to Shanghai on Saturday to make it clear that dictator Xi Jinping expects harsh lockdowns and strict adherence to China’s “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy, no matter how much damage is inflicted on the vital industrial and financial hub city, or its citizens.
China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday portrayed Sun as a no-nonsense disciplinarian whipping careless and indulgent Shanghai officials into shape:
Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, after visiting quarantine centers, makeshift hospitals, nucleic acid tests centers and communities, urged the city to adopt stricter attitude, more thorough measures, and swifter actions, to ratchet up building of makeshift hospitals, expand isolation venues, and strictly follow guidelines in order to defeat COVID-19.
Sun said Shanghai is at a crucial point in its fight against the virus, but with the help from other provinces and regions, the city will succeed.
The Vice Premier also asked Shanghai to plug loopholes, guarantee people’s life necessities and medical needs, and ensure smooth operation of ports and the supply chain industry.
Naturally, the Global Times reported Shanghai officials snapping to attention and regaling Sun with statistics about how many treatment beds, improvised hospitals, and medical teams the city has fielded.
The report described a sea change in the treatment of children who test positive, whom officials will now allegedly allow to stay with their parents instead of being ripped from their arms and tossed into understaffed treatment wards, without acknowledging the local, national, and global outcry against China’s cruel policies that prompted the change.
Sun’s arrival in Shanghai presaged a major Chinese Communist Party narrative shift on the outbreak. City officials previously stressed the importance of keeping the city running, quarantining blocks in stages, and completing a few rounds of mass testing.
When case numbers kept climbing, Xi demanded strict lockdowns without any of the promised allowances for vital industries or special considerations for Shanghai citizens. The city was plunged into chaos as harsh lockdowns were imposed without much warning, leaving residents trapped in their apartments while an army of armed enforcers patrolled the streets.
The new political narrative of the Shanghai outbreak blames local officials for not taking the problem seriously enough and deviating from China’s supposedly tried-and-true maximum lockdown strategy, as Sun rather explicitly stated on Wednesday.
“While some Western media is focusing on the ‘huge cost’ of the Shanghai’s fight against Omicron, hyping on its “failure of tactics” of controlling the epidemic resurgence, Chinese experts said like Hong Kong, Shanghai will also offer the valuable data sample for China in terms of the efficiency of vaccines, and how they prevent severe cases,” the Global Times sneered, implying Shanghai officials were unduly influenced by criticism from soft-on-coronavirus foreign powers with financial interests in the city.
The Global Times offered no hint of the anger and despair Shanghai residents have expressed to foreign media.
Reuters on Wednesday described frantic residents pleading with government officials for medicine to treat ailing elderly people and sometimes receiving only packets of Chinese “herbal remedies” for their trouble. Social media is brimming with complaints about poorly-implemented quarantine policies, constantly-changing protocols, and “crowded and unsanitary” conditions at hastily-constructed quarantine centers.
Insider on Wednesday said Shanghai has “come to a standstill” and posted “surreal” images of empty streets in the once-bustling metropolis – all due to a claim of just 425 symptomatic coronavirus infections. Lockdown restrictions were extended without warning for another ten days over the weekend.
A few of Shanghai’s big financial firms either received a warning through back channels, or correctly deduced draconian lockdowns were coming, because they made provisions for employees to live in their office cubicles until restrictions are lifted. At least 20,000 bankers and traders are reportedly living in their offices under increasingly grim conditions, making do without showers and begging the trapped workers in other office buildings to shut off their neon signs so everyone can sleep at night.
A widely-shared Tuesday post on China’s heavily-censored Weibo microblogging platform included a video allegedly showing imprisoned Shanghai residents gathering on their balconies to sing protest songs and complain about the lack of supplies – only for a drone to fly overhead and broadcast orders through a loudspeaker: “Please comply with Covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” Breitbart News could not independently verify the authenticity of the video.