Videos reportedly posted from Shanghai this week show Chinese police and health officials growing increasingly short-tempered and physical with the city’s 26 million desperate residents, now in the third week of a coronavirus lockdown that was only supposed to last a few days.
Breitbart News could not independently verify the videos, but many surfaced through the work of renowned journalists within the Chinese dissident community. Others appear to have initially surfaced in Chinese social media communications, though the communist regime heavily censors such sites within the country.
A video posted on Thursday obtained by Chinese dissident journalist Jennifer Zeng showed Shanghai police getting physical with citizens crowded outside a quarantine center, leaving some weeping in despair:
Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Thursday posted video of white-gowned police roughly breaking up a protest of residents angry that their community had been rezoned into a quarantine area without warning:
Another video allegedly shot by inmates trapped in a Shanghai high-rise appeared to show a neighbor forcibly subdued and dragged away by quarantine police from his apartment balcony:
Another video allegedly showing an ugly encounter with Shanghai’s white-garbed lockdown enforcers aboard a Shanghai bus went viral on Thursday because of what a finger-wagging police officer can be heard yelling at people resisting forced eviction from their homes: “This is caused by the international situation! If you continue to make trouble like this, there is no hope for us in China! It’s going to be a war with America, you know! Only the Communist Party can save China now!”
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Thursday reported a “deep sense of unease has descended on Shanghai,” seasoned with “simmering rage” at the harsh actions taken to enforce quarantine rules, the poor preparations made for locking down such a huge city, irritation at endless rounds of mandatory testing, and suspicions that the testing itself might be spreading the highly contagious Omicron variant.
“Patients keep grumbling about our bad mood and low efficiency. But we are exhausted, and a lot of us have threatened to quit our jobs,” a hospital nurse complained.
The SCMP cited viral videos recorded and circulated by Shanghai residents – who, thanks to the lockdown, are spending a great deal of time online – as a source of growing public anger, particularly the notorious video recorded last Friday of a pandemic enforcer beating a beloved family dog to death in the street.
Also causing great anxiety are photos and videos of Shanghai’s unpleasant quarantine centers, or fangcangs. The public is reportedly terrified of being marched off to the fangcangs due to positive test results, especially since the symptoms of Omicron infection are so mild compared to the harsh conditions and substantial risk of spreading infections in the quarantine areas.
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