The Chinese government is using mass transportation to ship thousands of Shanghai residents who allegedly tested positive for Chinese coronavirus to isolation camps in neighboring regions of China.
The move has sparked an angry backlash from residents of those areas, who fear the coronavirus will spread to their towns due to inadequate containment measures.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Wednesday quoted furious Chinese social media users who said the number of infected being shuttled out of Shanghai is vastly larger than their government is willing to admit, and the hasty decision to pull them out of the city was made without adequate preparations:
Social media user @DeliciousFishSkinCrispy called the policy “shameless,” saying that some 30,000 Shanghai residents are being sent to the eastern province of Zhejiang alone.
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User @RadishTuan1971 posted a video of an isolation convoy heading to Zhejiang’s provincial capital, Hangzhou.
“The neighborhood committee told us they wouldn’t be providing any protective clothing, and that large numbers of close contacts were being sent to Hangzhou,” the user commented, adding that he was worried about testing positive after being put on a bus with a group of potentially infected people despite quarantining at home for four days.
RFA noted that while the Chinese Communist government claims 13,354 confirmed coronavirus cases in Shanghai as of Tuesday, local media reports counted at least 20,000 patients transferred to quarantine facilities in six nearby towns.
RFA also quoted some increasingly irate members of Shanghai’s captive population who reported unequal treatment given to different parts of the city during its panicked lockdown. Residents of poor districts reported severe food shortages and neglect at isolation facilities, while those in wealthier districts received “proper fresh vegetables,” plus deliveries of “steak and shrimp balls.”
A group of Shanghai expatriates in New York called the Shanghai National Party began a three-day hunger strike on Monday in solidarity with residents of the brutally quarantined city. Protesters said that contrary to government statements, they have heard reports of people dying in Shanghai because they did not receive medical treatment, as well as people committing suicide due to “emotional breakdowns.”
There are signs of growing political unrest in China over the Shanghai lockdown, which was supposed to be imposed in stages and last only a few days but turned into a harsh citywide shutdown that trapped 26 million residents inside their homes and offices.
The New York Times (NYT) noted an “outpouring of public dissatisfaction rarely seen in China since the chaotic early days of the pandemic, in Wuhan,” and evaluated the situation as “a political test of the zero tolerance approach at large, on which the Communist Party has staked its legitimacy.”
“The fact that Shanghai is being locked down suggests that we are pretty close to the red line, to the tolerable limit of how defensible zero Covid is. This is a big city with a 25 million population, and is extremely challenging to undergo lockdown – it’s pretty close to people’s psychological breaking point,” University of Toronto political scientist Lynette Ong told the NYT.
As the angry social media posts from Shanghai and surrounding towns suggest, residents are shocked that Beijing would risk destroying the viability of the financial and commercial hub by locking it down, especially since the rapid spread of the omicron variant is defeating China’s vaunted “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy.
Shanghai has more information channels to the outside world than most Chinese cities, so its residents are well aware that the rest of the world has abandoned lockdowns and “learned to live” with Chinese coronavirus, while dictator Xi Jinping and his top henchpeople insist China will never take that approach.
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