Covid is exploding in China
Shanghai is locked down indefinitely
And people are getting fed up
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Shelley Zhang, filling in for Chris Chappell.
Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, and the Chinese Communist Party’s Zero Covid
policy was going full speed ahead.
Until it hit Shanghai.
That had to hurt.
Shanghai’s Covid lockdown has been extended indefinitely.
The city of 25 million people was supposed to end its 10-day lockdown yesterday.
But that was scrapped as the official number of Covid cases has tripled in the last nine
days.
Yes, the official count is almost definitely an underestimate.
But the fact that even the official numbers are the highest they’ve been since the initial
Wuhan outbreak is not good.
It’s a sign the Chinese Communist Party’s Zero Covid policy is failing against the highly
contagious Omicron variant.
But the Party is sticking with Zero Covid no matter what, since it comes all the way
from the top: Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Which means, the lockdowns will continue until the Chinese Communist Party comes out of this
looking good.
Which could be kind of hard, since the Shanghai lockdown is exposing a lot of China’s Covid
lies.
Like the one about the official numbers.
It turns out that an elderly care hospital in Shanghai is harboring an unreported Covid
outbreak and deaths.
“Shanghai’s government hasn’t reported any Covid-related deaths or outbreaks in its
hundreds of elderly-care centers since cases began climbing in the city in March.”
But there’s clearly been a cover up.
Dozens of staff at the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital, Shanghai’s largest, have been
quarantined with Covid.
According to replacement staff, at least 100 patients had tested positive for Covid-19.
Two other orderlies said the virus was spreading widely in the facility and that people were
dying.
“The two…said that on a recent night they had been asked to carry a body into a room
where other bodies were being stored.”
No one has been able to confirm whether these patients died of Covid.
But staff also said there’s been a shortage of tests and other resources.
And what’s even worse for the Chinese Communist Party is that reports of the deaths at this
hospital started spreading on Chinese social media.
Where they are of course being censored.
No official Chinese state-run media have reported this story.
Caixin, which is not state-run, attempted to report on the hidden deaths at Donghai.
Their story lasted an hour before it was disappeared.
Sixth Tone is an English language website that’s owned by a Shanghai state media company.
They can sometimes get away with more reporting since they’re supposed to be a “softer”
state-run media for a foreign audience.
Sixth Tone tried to run a story about the Donghai hospital, interviewing staff who “described
a chaotic situation: workers trapped in the hospital, a lack of basic hygiene in living
quarters, and mixing COVID-19 patients with others.”
Their story was censored, too.
The Covid coverup at this elderly care hospital is especially sensitive for the Chinese regime.
It contradicts their biggest propaganda: that China’s authoritarian Zero Covid policies
are justified because they’re saving lives.
Lockdowns have been working for the Chinese Communist Party because their authoritarian
system is set up for this kind of intense social control.
But now they have a population with little natural immunity.
And they’ve been giving people vaccines with lower effectiveness.
China also has problems with a low vaccination rate among the elderly.
At least partly because of a unique vaccination strategy.
“Chinese policy-makers focused on vaccinating cold-chain workers, border and port inspection
officers, and others handling imported goods or interacting with foreigners over inoculating
the elderly.”
Why did they do that instead of focusing on the more vulnerable elderly population?
Propaganda.
The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want to be blamed for the Covid pandemic.
So for the past two years, it’s been blaming Covid in China on foreigners and foreign goods.
Like Maine lobsters.
Canadian mail.
Frozen foods.
China is the only country in the world freaking out about this stuff.
But when you spend years claiming that foreign goods are the most dangerous transmitters
of an airborne respiratory virus, you have to follow that up by vaccinating people who
handle foreign goods instead of vulnerable elderly people.
And if that leads to a lot of preventable deaths, you’ve got to cover that up.
But those aren’t the only lockdown deaths in Shanghai.
People are dying from not being able to get medical care.
There have been multiple reports of people not being able to get dialysis.
And dying of asthma attacks.
The New York Times spoke to one man whose father died two days after testing positive
for Covid.
But his father didn’t die of Covid.
His father had diabetes and kidney failure.
While waiting in an 8-hour line for Covid treatment, he ran out of medication, and couldn’t
get emergency dialysis.
He ended up dying of heart failure.
Chinese internet users have been outraged at these stories.
At least, until everything gets censored, including their outrage.
I’ll tell you what else they’re outraged about, after the break.
Welcome back.
Shanghai is going through a full Covid lockdown.
Anyone who tests positive, even if they are asymptomatic, is taken away to a quarantine
facility.
That includes kids.
Who are separated from their parents.
Even if the parents test positive for Covid, too.
If you’re thinking that sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare that makes no sense, you would be
right.
A video started circulating on Chinese social media showing children at one hospital.
Crying infants and toddlers unsupervised, sometimes three or four to a bed, with almost
no adults around.
That video was of course censored.
The New York Times talked to a woman whose 2-year-old daughter was locked inside that
hospital.
She called it “totally inhumane.”
She wasn’t able to even see a video of her daughter for days.
After a huge online backlash, Chinese authorities seem to have realized this was going too far.
They’re now saying parents can stay with their kids at these makeshift hospitals.
Although the state of these makeshift quarantine centers is also a question.
Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed chaotic scenes at one Shanghai quarantine
site.
People were fighting over basic supplies.
Very Lord of the Flies.
Add subtitles: Nanhui quarantine site
Chaos No one’s in charge
You have to snatch your own supplies Everyone is panicking
Please expose this situation
Yes, this seems like a good way to prevent the spread of Covid.
Another video allegedly of the same quarantine site at night shows things getting worse.
They’re fighting!
The police can’t control this.
With videos like this it’s no surprise that some people are more afraid of being sent
to a quarantine site than they are of getting Covid.
But even for people who are just stuck in their apartments during the lockdown, getting
food has been a problem.
With no one actually allowed to leave their homes, people have been relying on deliveries.
Which doesn’t always work out.
So many people are trying to get food that it’s almost impossible to get food.
People are even having a hard time getting water.
You don’t want to drink Chinese tap water.
In some buildings, Chinese authorities have delivered supplies.
In other buildings, Chinese authorities are just taking pictures of themselves delivering
supplies, and then bringing the supplies back.
Doing it for the ‘gram.
So much more efficient than actually giving people food.
But what’s even more infuriating than that are the videos of food being donated to Shanghai
from other parts of China that were left to rot on the side of the road when the trucks
carrying the food weren’t allowed to enter Shanghai.
Other videos show a warehouse of rotting vegetables.
And workers throwing spoiled meat into the trash.
Next time someone tries to convince you that the Chinese Communist Party is full of super
capable technocrats who built a highly efficient government system, show them this episode.
As you can imagine, people in Shanghai are getting fed up.
More after the break.
Welcome back.
Shanghai residents are getting fed up with China’s strict lockdowns.
As one Shanghai resident put it: “I support the fight against the epidemic and I don’t
agree with opening everything up.
But we should choose the lesser of two evils between the reality of people breaking down
because they are not able to eat; not able to see a doctor; not able to get one single
dish; not able to leave the house at all, and the risks we face if we’d let society
proceed normally.”
People’s increasing frustration with the lockdown might explain why the video of this
Shanghai guy went viral.
I’m recording this, I’m a law enforcement officer.
Who are you enforcing the law for?
Please wear a mask!
Who are you enforcing the law for?
Please wear a mask!
[flash cut to 1:31] Get in the car!
Why aren’t you wearing a mask?
He put up quite a fight, but eventually the police took him away.
Because people in Shanghai who are getting fed up, are also getting beaten down.
We might even get demonetized for showing you this.
And this one, of someone getting manhandled onto a quarantine bus.
And this one, of people being dragged and carried screaming to quarantine.
But even if we get demonetized, we think it’s important to expose the brutal reality of
the Chinese Communist Party’s Zero Covid lockdown.
Something that the Chinese regime does not want people to see, judging by how fast they’re
censoring these videos on social media.
Here’s the thing about Shanghai’s lockdown.
This is all happening in other parts of China, too.
For example, all of Jilin province has been locked down for almost a month now.
And a lot of the same things are happening there.
Like food shortages.
And people dying because they can’t get medical care.
But a lot of this is easier to see in Shanghai.
Shanghai is China’s most cosmopolitan city.
There are more people who are connected enough to let the outside world know what’s happening.
When you have a BBC reporter talking about how he can’t get food, that’s harder to
cover up than something that happens in China’s countryside.
And the Shanghai lockdown isn’t just exposing China’s Covid lies.
It’s also exposing the brutality and the absolute absurdities that come with China’s
communist system.
Chinese officials are always incentivized to go too far, to do too much rather than
not enough.
Because they’re much more likely to get punished for not doing enough.
So Zero Covid becomes political theater.
Sometimes literally.
The banner in the back says “Fighting the epidemic is everyone’s duty.
Unity is strength.”
And the song that’s playing is “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New
China.”
Zero Covid is not about saving people from Covid.
It’s about maintaining the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
And that’s the most outrageous thing of all.
The question is: as more people get fed up with the lockdowns, will they get fed up with
the Party as well?
Thanks for watching this episode of China Uncensored.
Once again, I’m Shelley Zhang.
Chris will be back on Friday.