Shanghai’s still locked down
And people are reaching their breaking point
Could China’s lockdowns
End the Chinese Communist Party?
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Shelley Zhang, filling in for Chris Chappell, who’s plotting the downfall of
the CCP.
This episode is sponsored by Surfshark.
You should be using a VPN like Surfshark to protect yourself whenever you go online.
Someday the Chinese Communist Party will fall.
Will it be a slow domino effect?
Or a sudden crash?
The Party has staked everything on defeating Covid-19.
While other countries are opening up, China is doubling down on their zero Covid policy.
You might think it was a mistake for the Communist Party to tie their political legitimacy to
eradicating a highly transmissible respiratory virus.
But the Party is never wrong.
According to the Party.
I’ve talked before about some of the practical reasons the Chinese regime is sticking with
lockdowns.
Like the fact that Chinese vaccines aren’t that good, many elderly people aren’t vaccinated,
and China has much lower herd immunity than other countries.
Many parts of China also have a very poor healthcare system.
But this isn’t just about practicality.
It’s about ideology.
From the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party has been using the coronavirus
as propaganda.
Only China is fighting the virus, only China is shielding the vulnerable.
China isn’t going to live with the virus like other countries have done.
Because no one cares more about saving lives than the Chinese Communist Party.
But because zero Covid is now about proving that the Party knows best, they can’t back
down.
Even when harsh, extended lockdowns are leading to this.
So since the Communist Party has tied their leadership to defeating Covid, will not defeating
Covid lead to their downfall?
Of course not!
Because Shanghai is reaching a turning point today.
Right now.
On Wednesday.
According to the Party.
“Shanghai's new target of ‘zero-COVID at the community level’ by April 20 was
communicated in recent days to the city's Communist Party cadres.”
"The State Council Working Group, the municipal party committee and municipal government have
asked that the turning point of the epidemic should appear on the 17th and that zero-COVID
status should be reached on the 20th."
Yeah, be sure to let the virus know that it has to stop spreading today.
That’s it.
No more Covid.
At the community level.
What is zero Covid at the community level?
“No new cases outside quarantined areas.”
This might sound familiar.
Because the city of Xi’an did something similar during their lockdown back in January,
announcing they had achieved zero Covid on a societal level!
How did they do that?
By removing residents who had Covid from the city.
Hey, then technically there aren’t any cases in Xi’an.
Problem solved.
Zero Covid is impossible to achieve.
So the Chinese regime will just move the goalposts, and achieve the new goal, instead.
Unless they need to move the goalposts again.
For example, did you think that zero Covid means zero Covid cases?
Oh no, no, no.
That’s a common misconception.
According to China’s CDC, the “Dynamic zero-COVID policy does not mean having no
infected cases.”
Yes, zero does not mean zero.
You can have tons of Covid cases, as long as they are quarantined from society.
This isn’t the first time Chinese authorities have fudged definitions like this.
In fact, Shanghai’s Covid numbers are incredibly weird, even for China.
They have a huge number of asymptomatic cases.
And it could be because they’re counting mild cases of Covid as asymptomatic.
In Shanghai, “the asymptomatic rate has stood at around 97%, far higher than anywhere
else in the world, where it has been closer to 50%.”
Epidemiologists say this makes no sense.
But according to Reuters, adding mild cases to asymptomatic cases in other areas of China
would give similar numbers to Shanghai.
Why would Shanghai count mild cases as asymptomatic?
Well, unlike other countries, China doesn’t count asymptomatic cases in their official
Covid case count.
They count asymptomatic cases separately.
Don’t get me wrong, asymptomatic people get sent to quarantine camps.
But they just don’t make China’s official numbers look bad.
And that’s what’s important.
So to recap, because zero Covid is impossible, the Chinese Communist Party has redefined
what zero Covid, or “dynamic” zero Covid, means.
And their new definition means that they’re going to need to do even more mass testing
and then rush any positive cases off to the quarantine camps.
People are more afraid of going to the camps than getting sick.
People are packed together, with no privacy, no showers, not enough toilets.
This is not somewhere you go to recover from an illness.
It’s somewhere you’re sent because you’re diseased.
“The conditions of some [quarantine camps] are so appalling that they’re called ‘refugee
camps’ and ‘concentration camps’ on social media.”
No one wants to go to the camps.
But now they’re going to shove as many people as they can into the camps in order to get
those cases out of the community.
Even if it was ok for them to be in the community before.
Here’s what happened when a Shanghai neighborhood committee worker tried to tell a German expat
that he had to go to a quarantine camp…12 days after he tested positive.
“I tested first positive on [expletive] April the 3rd.
April 3.
They left us here for 12 days, then they decided to take us, then they sent us back home after
leaving us there in the cold for five hours.
This is [expletive] ridiculous.
This is insane.
So, sorry that you are in the middle but this is ridiculous.”
So it seems like the quarantine camp wouldn’t take him, then suddenly after this new policy,
they wanted him to go back.
And he probably didn’t even have Covid anymore.
I’d be swearing a lot too.
This phone call went hugely viral on the Chinese internet.
At least before it was censored for violating regulations.
But what’s really telling is that before the Shanghai lockdown, plenty of Chinese people
would have been incredibly offended at this foreigner for insulting China.
Now, they’re cheering him on.
This went viral because the German expat was saying things that Chinese citizens want to
say but can’t: that the system is insane and ridiculous and a disgrace.
That’s not good for the Chinese Communist Party.
More signs that people in Shanghai are reaching their breaking point, after the break.
Welcome back.
Things are unraveling in Shanghai.
Even before the new stricter quarantine policies, so many people were resisting going to quarantine
camps that these notices were sent out.
It says that if you refuse to go to a quarantine camp, your health code would turn red permanently.
That means your movements will be restricted indefinitely.
Meanwhile esperate people are asking for help on social media, like a pregnant woman who
said that she had been stuck quarantining in her car for six days after testing positive.
Her husband was sent to a quarantine camp, but they wouldn’t take her.
And she had run out of food, and her baby wasn’t moving.
After her story attracted a lot of attention, she was able to get to the hospital in an
ambulance.
Others weren’t so lucky.
People in Shanghai have started keeping a crowdsourced list of people who died during
the lockdown.
Shanghai’s official Covid death count is 10 people.
Which is too low to be true.
One reason for this could be China’s narrow definition of deaths from infectious diseases.
“Chinese hospitals tended to focus on chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease or
diabetes as the cause of death even when people had contracted the virus.”
So say someone had heart disease, and then got Covid and died.
In the US, they would be counted as a Covid death.
In China, they would have died of heart disease.
Which has the bonus of making China’s Covid death rate look low and China’s political
system look superior.
But it doesn’t look superior to the relatives of people who died during the Shanghai lockdown
because they couldn’t get medical treatment.
Not because they had Covid, but because of the lockdown.
This is the crowdsourced list of lockdown deaths.
As of this recording, there are 163 entries, although some of them cover multiple people.
Like one that documented more than 19 people who died at a nursing home.
Chinese censors deleted the original list.
Then when internet users saved it on a blockchain-based website, they blocked the URL in China.
But they can’t block people’s frustration.
Last week, a phone call between a Shanghai resident and a neighborhood committee worker
went viral.
The resident, Mr. Yu, called saying he had no medicine or food left, and he wasn’t
feeling well and wanted to go to the hospital.
The worker said he had submitted Mr. Yu’s request to go to the hospital but hadn’t
heard back.
After so many days, I still haven’t received a reply.
They haven’t given me a reply.
So if they don’t give you a reply, you don’t do anything?
No, I still have a lot of things I’m helping with.
It’s not just you.
Today I had to find a way to help a pregnant woman leave.
Today I had to deal with a deceased elderly person.
Mr. Yu, it’s not that we don’t do anything, we need to do a lot of things.
We are helpless.
They discuss how no one answers the emergency hotlines in the city.
Mr. Yu eventually asks why the authorities aren’t doing more to help the common people.
That’s when the community worker just breaks down.
Can’t they save our ordinary people?
I also want them to save our ordinary people.
I want that too!
Why is it like this?
Why?
Why do you ask why?
Why are they like this?
Why say this?
They don’t take care of elderly people.
They don’t take care of pregnant women.
They don’t take care of dead people.
They don’t even take care of the trash cans.
The community worker tells Mr. Yu that he’s depressed because he sees hundreds of these
cases every day.
Mr. Yu tries to comfort him, saying he understands.
In the end, neither of them has any answers.
I’m sorry, Mr. Yu.
There’s nothing I can do.
Has our country really become like this?
I don’t know why Shanghai has become like this, either.
You can hear the anguish in their voices.
And like I said, this recording went viral.
Which also means of course that it’s been censored.
But censorship isn’t going to fix the problem.
People have started refusing to take Covid tests.
Some people are afraid that the process of mass testing is actually spreading Covid.
Others are just tired of this and don’t see an end.
Now refusing to get tested is a minor act of civil disobedience, born out of frustration.
It’s not a revolution.
But this is a problem for the Shanghai authorities, since their whole strategy now relies on intensive
testing to find and remove positive cases.
And Shanghai is urging cooperation with the new rounds of testing.
And it’s not just the testing.
Remember what I said about rounding people up for quarantine?
“Residents shared stories on social media about busloads of people being taken from
their homes and sent into quarantine, including babies and the elderly.”
But as the drive to put people into quarantine camps accelerates, it’s not clear how cooperative
people are going to be.
Especially as they watch elderly relatives or their children get forced into quarantine.
So what happens next?
Will Shanghai successfully reach zero “community spread” of Covid?
Or will the harsh lockdowns, mass testing, and inhumane treatment it takes to get there
further break down society?
The thing is, Shanghai is China’s wealthiest, most cosmopolitan, and biggest city.
A lot of the people locked in their apartments right now had a pretty good life before this.
They probably didn’t think much about the fact that they were living under an authoritarian
regime.
And even the people who weren’t huge fans of the Chinese Communist Party were not dissidents.
The Chinese Communist Party has always persecuted people.
But they successfully convinced most people that the ones being persecuted deserved it.
They were counterrevolutionaries, splittists, cultists, terrorists, troublemakers, freaks.
Not like “normal” people.
If you just obeyed Chinese authorities, nothing bad would happen, right?
But that’s not the case with the Covid lockdowns.
Everyone in the lockdown suffers.
Sure, some more than others.
But it gets a lot harder to ignore the flaws of the system.
China’s Covid lockdowns aren’t going to lead to the immediate downfall of the Chinese
Communist Party.
But a lot of people in Shanghai are opening their eyes.
Of course people outside Shanghai who didn’t go through the lockdown know exactly who to
blame for Shanghai’s problems: Shanghai.
For not being strict enough in its lockdowns and quarantines.
At least until it’s their turn to experience a lockdown.
The question is, when Shanghai finally comes out of its lockdown, will people remember?
Will they remember what it was like to be locked down, to have no control, to see the
truth censored before their eyes?
To, like Mr. Yu, wonder why things are like this?
How did our country become this way?
If they remember, then one more domino falls for the Chinese Communist Party.
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Once again, I’m Shelley Zhang.
Thanks for watching China Uncensored.