Living with Covid-19 in China: Rejoind Wu on the 2019 Beijing Xinjiang xenophobic Pandemic

Editor’s Note: Matthew Bossons is an editor and journalist based in Shanghai. He has lived in China since 2014. The views expressed in this commentary are of his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Having lived through the wave of xenophobia that accompanied the closure of China’s borders in the spring of 2020 – when Covid-19 was largely under control in China and running rampant abroad – Wu’s proclamation associating foreigners with disease immediately triggered alarm bells.

For days on end, he waded through an endless flood of private messages in his Twitter inbox, sent by people across China with updates to share about the demonstrations and their aftermath. He posted them on their behalf, so that they wouldn’t be looked into by Chinese authorities.

In China’s far west region of Xinjiang, officials imposed a near-total lockdown and made a rare admission of failure in their handling of a Covid outbreak. In Inner Mongolia, the authorities pledged to cut the spread of the virus. In a popular travel destination in south China, the government canceled flights, trapping angry tourists at an airport.

Infamously, many of the city’s African residents were expelled from their residences and denied access to hotels despite having not left the country since the pandemic began. Out of fear of contracting the virus, taxi drivers refused to pick up foreigners, gyms turned away non-Chinese patrons and expats on the subway found themselves with more personal space than usual as local commuters fled for the neighboring carriage.

These memories came back when Wu made a post on social media. While I pondered how local commuters would treat me the following Monday, my biggest concern was how my daughter would fare at the local kindergarten in our new home base of Shanghai. (We had moved from Guangzhou to Beijing in July 2020, and from Beijing to Shanghai in July 2021).

Evelyn does not look like a Chinese person even though she has Chinese ancestry. My wife, who hails from the eastern part of China, sees this and points it out to her. As such, she stands out among her classmates, who are all ethnically Chinese.

My worst fears were seemingly confirmed the following Monday evening when Evelyn returned from school and told her mom that she wanted more than anything to “look Chinese.” Visibly upset, she said that some of her classmates had taunted her with calls of “waigouren,” meaning ‘foreigner’ in Mandarin Chinese.

Evelyn was only three years old at the time, and not yet going to school, helping to insulate her from the discrimination in Guangzhou. This time around, however, she is much more vulnerable to health-related hysteria.

This potent mix of propaganda and control under Xi appears to have had its desired effect on a large segment of Chinese society, creating a buffer for the leadership by convincing enough people of the superiority of China’s system even as millions of their fellow countrymen grow resentful of “zero-Covid.” But this approach, combined with prolonged border closure and escalating geopolitical tensions, also provides fertile ground for xenophobia.

Daily Covid counts have more than doubled in the past week, to around 1,400 cases on Friday, in the country of 1.4 billion people — a tally that remains tiny by global standards. But Chinese authorities are under immense pressure to ensure that nothing disrupts the party congress, which starts Oct. 16. They have responded by increasing the restrictions that they already have. They are locking down regions and cities and mandating mass testing and quarantines, disrupting life for millions of people and drawing public complaints.

Zhou’s anger is part of a growing torrent of dissent toward China’s unrelenting zero-Covid lockdowns, which officials insist are necessary to protect people’s lives against a virus that, according to the official count, has killed just six people from tens of thousands of symptomatic cases reported in the last six months.

The woman is yelling at the workers because she has been under quasar for half a year. They stared back, seemingly indifferent.

The Sitong Bridge protest on Weibo, the super app, and the leader of the country’s zero-Covid policy

The zero- Covid policy is an attempt by the government to align themselves with the successful model of fighting Covid, which is what the president already associated himself with.

Observers will be watching the twice-a-decade meeting for signs of the party’s priorities when it comes to its zero-computation stance, which has been blamed for worsening the economy.

“Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. Yes to vote, but no to a great leader. One banner read, “don’t be a slave, be a citizen”, while the other called for the removal of adictator and national traitor.

Chen had tried to share the Sitong Bridge protest on WeChat, China’s super app, but it kept getting censored. He wondered why he wouldn’t write slogans in nearby places to let more people know about him.

Numerous accounts on Weibo and WeChat, the super-app essential for daily life in China, have been banned after commenting on – or alluding to – the protest.

Many spoke out to show their support. Some shared the Chinese pop hit “Lonely Warrior” in a veiled reference to the protester, who some called a “hero,” while others swore never to forget, posting under the hashtag: “I saw it.”

The Beijing Wall of Truth: New Covid-19 cases in Shanghai, Xinjiang, and far western Mongolia after the Beijing Cybersecurity Lockdowns

Even in the face of rising public discontent, state media articles this week suggest that the country will not change tack post Congress, with all the signs suggesting the zero- Covid approach will stay put for at least the next two years.

In Shanghai, where 25 million people have already endured two months of the world’s strictest lockdown, residents are now on edge at any signs of a repeat as authorities begin to tighten measures once again.

The city reported 47 Covid-19 cases on Thursday, one day after authorities ordered six out of its 13 districts to shut entertainment venues such as internet cafes, cinemas and bars. Shanghai’s Disney resort has suspended some of its attractions and live performances since Sunday.

Spooked by the possibility of unpredictable and unannounced snap lockdowns – and mindful that authorities have previously backtracked after suggesting that no such measures were coming – some people in the city have reportedly been hoarding drinking water.

That panic buying has been made worse by an announcement that Shanghai’s water authorities have taken action to ensure water quality after discovering saltwater inflows to two reservoirs at the mouth of the Yangtze River in September.

The country has also seen an uptick in cases in domestic tourist destinations, despite its strict curbs having discouraged people from traveling or spending over China’s Golden Week holiday in early October.

More than 240,000 university students in Inner Mongolia have been locked down on campuses due to the latest outbreak, according to Zhang Xiaoying, a deputy director of the regional Department of Education. After 39 students from his institution tested positive for the STD, the Communist Party boss of a university was fired and he was the only one to have been sacked.

Then there is the situation in far western Xinjiang, where some 22 million people have been banned from leaving the region and are required to stay home. Xinjiang recorded 403 new cases on Thursday, according to an official tally.

Yet amid it all, Beijing appears unwilling to move from its hardline stance. commentaries from the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily reiterated that China would not let its guard down.

The battle against Covid was winnable, it insisted. Other countries that had reopened and eased restrictions had done so because they had no choice, it said, as they had failed to “effectively control the epidemic in a timely manner.”

The Great Wall: An Overview of China’s Rise During the Xirrational Double-Anisotropy Deceleration

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. You can sign up here.

During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.

A few local families walked past us as we climbed the restored section of the old landmark. Noticing our kids, one of their children exclaimed: “Wow foreigners! With Covid? Let us get away from them. The adults were quiet as the group speeded up.

Understanding the big picture is timely as Xi is poised to break convention to assume a third term as the head of the Chinese Communist Party – the real source of his power instead of the ceremonial presidency – at the ruling party’s twice-a-decade national congress, which opened in Beijing on Sunday.

The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, stood nearly empty when we went thanks to Xi’s insistence – three years into the global pandemic – on a policy of zero tolerance for Covid infections while the rest of the world has mostly moved on and re-opened.

China’s borders have been closed for international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners choose to leave the country.

Authorities discouraged domestic travel after the Omicron variant spread through parts of the country. They are also sticking to a playbook of strict quarantine, incessant mass testing and invasive contact tracing – often locking down entire cities of millions over a handful of cases.

Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

The Importance of Walls for the Future of China: A Comment on Sun Chunlan, the Great Wall and the First Coronavirus Outbreak

The Chinese economy was relied on for rapid growth and rising incomes for more than one billion people over the past few decades. A world recession is a harsh reality check for international community, and the growth engine of the global economy is sputtering.

Mobile phone health codes are the backbone of a system designed to track citizens and designate whether they are cleared to enter various venues, upping state control on people’s movement to an extent never before seen in China.

Zhou believes the zero- Covid policy is beneficial to the majority but doesn’t like its local implementation.

In addition to China’s sense of besiegement in a US-led world order, which has been made clear by the fact that Xi has tried to make Russia part of the world order, that outward power projection is also something that contributes to that. The Chinese strongman wants total control at home, and the higher the barriers are to keep out outsiders, the more likely it is that they are the source of dangerous viruses and ideas.

The local child’s remarks on the Great Wall reflected that. The danger of blaming foreigners comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of domestic pressures.

With China’s increasing economic and military might, coexistence with the West has given way to confrontation with the United States and its allies. The days of hiding a person’s strength and waiting for the right time are over, as Chinese diplomats under the direction of Xi are ready to kill anyone who dares to question their government.

The emperors of those dynasties, who also rebuilt parts of the Great Wall, failed to reverse their country’s decline back then. But the tools at their disposal were no match to the high-tech ones in the hands of China’s current ruler. He seems confident that his walls will help him realize his goal of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

HONG KONG — As anger simmered in Wuhan over the mishandling of the first coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, the Communist Party sent top officials to deal with the growing political crisis. One of them, Sun Chunlan, stayed for three months, rallying local cadres and sourcing protective gear for health workers and hospital beds for patients.

Ms. Sun warned that deserters would be locked up to the pillar of historical shame and called for absolute loyalty.

The One Is One, Zero Is Zero: A Chinese Software Engineer’s Blog About Measuring China’s Politics and Digital Economy

It is a position that she has become accustomed to as the rare woman in the top levels of Chinese politics, driving the party’s will and carrying the country’s criticism. “Women most of the time get pushed to the frontline when male politicians don’t want to deal with a crisis,” said Hanzhang Liu, assistant professor of politics at Pitzer College.

More Less, a software engineer from China who works in a Silicon Valley-based company, says that one is one, zero is zero. “I think it’s my responsibility to rebut this nonsense.”

He didn’t want his posts to attract harassment so he asked not to be identified. There is a grassroots movement against political misinformation spread by users of Chinese-language social media, and his Chinese-language fact-checking blog is part of it. His recent posts have taken on claims that California Democrats made it legal to shoplift up to $950 in goods or that widespread voter fraud distorted the 2020 presidential election.

More Less is concerned about the integrity of the upcoming elections in the United States because of posts stoking racial tensions and casting doubt on the election’s integrity.

Chinese government censorship and WeChat’s US acceptable use policy prevents misinformation and inappropriate content, ban ads or sponsored content for political issues, and are included within China. But people tracking misinformation say that the platform is largely unmoderated in the US. WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, declined to respond to questions about misinformation spreading among US users.

We don’t get anything else. Nobody is cleaning it up,” says Jin Xia Niu, Chinese digital engagement program manager at nonprofit Chinese for Affirmative Action. In June, the San Francisco organization launched a Chinese-language fact-checking initiative called PiYaoBa, which posts articles to its website and public WeChat accounts that are written in a similar style to fact-checking organizations such as Snopes and FactCheck.org.

Consumers in China have had an easy way to shop, dine, and travel with China’s advanced online ecosystem running on mobile phone super apps. Today, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.

Living in public: The impact of zero Covid data on public health in China in the run up to the Communist Party Congress and the Third Ring Road Bridge

In the country, basic activities including going to the grocery store, riding public transport or entering an office building need to be done with a negative Covid test if they are not to be flagged as close contacts of a patient.

You can be at risk if you go out in public, as being put under the care of authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lock down may depend on whether someone tests positive or not.

One person said that there were many flaws in big data, and that it had control over their daily life.

Li, who had been with his wife at the time, said they were able to reach a hotline and explain their situation, giving them her health code to green.

“The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.

The viral comment that asked what makes someone think they won’t be on the late-night bus is one of a number of examples of how frustrated people are about the policy.

The banners hung from the Third Ring Road bridge were a result of a rare political protest in Beijing.

The impact of those controls is becoming sharper, as lockdowns – which have repeatedly left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income and a mental toll – have become more frequent.

In the run up to the Party Congress, controls amplified – as local authorities around the country sought to tamp down on outbreaks coinciding with the major political event.

“Maintaining the zero-Covid strategy is now substantially more costly than it was a year ago, because the latest (viral) strains are so much more transmissible and outbreaks are occurring more frequently,” said epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

Keeping tight control and closed borders will be useless since the virus will stay in circulation outside of China, and that means that the focus must be on preparing, for example through raising elderly vaccination rates or increasing ICU capacity or getting or expanding access to the most effective vaccines.

Low vaccination rates among China’s elderly have led to fears that a loosening of restrictions could overwhelm the country’s health system. As of November 11, about two-thirds of people age 80 and older had received two doses, and only 40% had received a booster shot.

“The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The Great Leap Forward, the Great Hall of the People, and the Sitong Bridge: Jolie and the emergence of the Communist Party

When health codes turned red, a group of people lost their savings in rural banks and were barred from protesting.

There was the Great Leap Forward, the industrial reform campaign begun in 1958 that precipitated a devastating famine; the political witch hunts of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which nearly tore China apart; and many more, some more damaging than others, and each targeting some political, social or economic imperative of the day. The Communist Party has achieved a near perfect synergy between the government and the population.

Jolie’s nerves were running high as she walked into the campus of Goldsmiths, the University of London, last Friday morning. She planned to get to the campus early so that it would be empty, but her peers were already at work.

She immediately pasted one of the students from China on the notice board after making sure that none of the students were watching.

“Life not zero-Covid policy, freedom not martial-lawish lockdown, dignity not lies, reform not cultural revolution, votes not dictatorship, citizens not slaves,” it read, in English.

Over the past week, as party elites gathered in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to extoll Xi and his policies at the 20th Party Congress, anti-Xi slogans echoing the Sitong Bridge banners have popped up in a growing number of Chinese cities and hundreds of universities worldwide.

A number of pro-democracyInstagram accounts run by Chinese nationals have been keeping track of anti-Xi graffiti and posters. Half of the reports Citizens dailycn got from mainland China were about the bathroom. Users said the slogans were from Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, which is why Northern_Square has 42,000 followers.

The two Instagram accounts, Citizensdailycn and Northern_square, said they each received more than 1,000 submissions of anti-Xi posters from the Chinese diaspora. According to Citizensdailycn’s tally, the posters have been sighted at 320 universities across the world.

As China’s online censors went into overdrive last week to scrub out all discussions about the Sitong Bridge protest, some social media users shared an old Chinese saying: “A tiny spark can set the prairie ablaze.”

It would appear that the fire started by the “Bridge Man” has done just that, setting off an unprecedented show of dissent against Xi’s leadership and authoritarian rule among mainland Chinese nationals.

Critics of Xi have paid a heavy price. Two years ago, Ren Zhiqiang, a Chinese billionaire who criticized Xi’s handling of China’s initial Covid-19 outbreak and called the top leader a power-hungry “clown,” was jailed for 18 years on corruption charges.

But the risks of speaking out did not deter Raven Wu, a university senior in eastern China. Inspired by the “Bridge Man,” Wu left a message in English in a bathroom stall to share his call for freedom, dignity, reform, and democracy. Below the message, he drew a picture of Winnie the Pooh wearing a crown, with a “no” sign drawn over it. (Xi has been compared to the chubby cartoon bear by Chinese social media users.)

“I felt a long-lost sense of liberation when I was scribbling,” Wu said. No political self-expression is allowed in this country of extreme cultural and political censorship. I felt good because I did the right thing for the people, for the first time in my life as a Chinese citizen.

Chen Qiang, a fresh graduate in southwestern China, shared that bleak outlook – the economy is faltering, and censorship is becoming ever more stringent, he said.

The movement was dubbed the “Toilet Revolution” by some because it is a jibe against the campaign to improve the sanitary conditions at public restrooms in China.

For many overseas Chinese students, including Jolie, it is their first time to have taken political action, driven by a mixture of awe and guilt toward the “Bridge Man” and a sense of duty to show solidarity.

Among the posters on the notice boards of Goldsmiths, the University of London, is one with a photo of the Sitong Bridge protest, which showed a plume of dark smoke billowing up from the bridge.

The biggest thing I can do is putting up protest posters, but not because of my ability but because of my lack of courage.

Some people felt a similar sense of guilt. I feel bad, I’m ashamed. Yvonne Li, who graduated in the Netherlands last year, said that she wouldn’t have the courage to do such a thing if she were in Beijing.

“I really wanted to cry when I first saw the protest on Instagram. I felt politically depressed reading Chinese news everyday. I couldn’t see any hope. But when I saw this brave man, I realized there is still a glimmer of light,” she said.

Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, said he is struck by how fast the overseas opposition to Xi has gathered pace and how far it has spread.

When Xi scrapped presidential term limits in 2018, posters featuring the slogan “Not My President” and Xi’s face had surfaced in some universities outside China – but the scale paled in comparison, Teng noted.

The protest that I attended mainly consisted of members of the Chinese diaspora—a majority of them young professionals and students who still call China home. China’s youth have been branded as politically apathetic and divorced from the country’s past due to a culture of strict government, and this should not be taken for granted. Most millennials and Gen Z had zero organizing or protesting experience, but now they are connecting over social media into a nascent movement against a powerful authoritarian regime.

“Even liberal democracies are influenced by China’s long arm of repression. The Chinese government has a large amount of spies and informants, monitoring overseas Chinese through various United Front-linked organizations,” Teng said, referring to a party body responsible for influence and infiltration operations abroad.

Teng said Beijing has extended its grip on Chinese student bodies abroad to police the speech and actions of its nationals overseas – and to make sure the party line is observed even on foreign campuses.

We were looking around and were scared. I found it absurd at the time and reflected briefly upon it – what we were doing is completely legal here (in the Netherlands), but we were still afraid of being seen by other Chinese students,” said Li, the recent graduate in Rotterdam.

The fear of being betrayed by peers is something that has weighed heavily on Jolie, who was born and raised in China and now studied in London. She said that she was feeling lonely. “The horrible (thing) is that your friends and classmates may report you.”

She found solidarity in the others who did the same, as she showed her support for the bridge man. In the day following the protest in Beijing, Jolie saw on Instagram an outpouring of photos showing protest posters from all over the world.

“I was so moved and also a little bit shocked that (I) have many friends, although I don’t know them, and I felt a very strong emotion,” she said. “I just thought – my friends, how can I contact you, how can I find you, how can we recognize each other?”

Bridge protesters and the loss of Chinese people in the U.S., China, and around the world: a Chinese student’s perspective

Sometimes, all it takes is a knowing smile from a fellow Chinese student, or a new protest poster on the same notice board, to make the students feel reassured.

When I first hung the posters, I went back and checked to make sure they weren’t gone and then I would see another poster hanging by someone else.

“I feel like it is my responsibility to do this,” they said. It will be over if they don’t do anything, and I don’t want that to happen without consequences.

“Maybe (the bridge protester) is the only one with such courage and willingness to sacrifice, but there may be millions of other Chinese people who share his views,” said Matt, a Chinese student at Columbia University in New York.

He doesn’t want such things to happen again in China and around the world. I lost my dad. My son has lost a family member. I’m furious now.”

Losing My Daughter and Daughter Without Taking Self Isolation: An Unexpected Loss Due to Covid-19 in the City of Lanzhou, China

Students in many cities in China are back to remote learning. My 5-year-old daughter is on her second week off school after her kindergarten closed due to restrictions related to Covid-19. At this point, she has spent more time at home in 2022 than in the classroom.

It is nearly impossible to plan more than 20 minutes in advance of the time. It is bad for business and affects ordinary people in many ways, from being locked out of their apartment, to missing work, to not being able to go to Disneyland.

Some friends, who have suffered through an unexpected lockdown or two, have even taken to carrying a backpack full of clothes, toiletries and work essentials with them at all times in case they get trapped at the local pub.

In the US, one in five urban youth is out of work, business meetings and trade shows are being postponed or canceled, and many people are afraid of the coronaviruses, which resulted in a huge event at a factory in Taiwan where employees literally fled down a highway.

If you are going from a city with a disease outbreak, you might want to take self-isolation upon disembarking the plane. Alas, not.

But here’s the real kicker: While I needed to stay home for four days, my wife and daughter, who live with me, were allowed to leave the apartment and wander around the city at will. The policy would allow for such a risk to public health because I was exposed to the virus and my family are now carriers.

A survey conducted across China in 2020 found that over a quarter of the respondents were suffering from psychological distress due to the pandemic.

Earlier this month, a 55-year-old woman reportedly suffering from anxiety disorders jumped to her death from her locked-down apartment building in the capital city of China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

A young boy died after a suspected gas leak at a locked-down residential compound in the western city of Lanzhou. The boy’s father claimed that he tried to alert health workers to call an ambulance, but was denied prompt access to emergency services due to his Covid-19 testing status.

While there is no shortage of vocal zero-Covid defenders on Chinese social media, there are also some voicing disapproval online and offline in the country.

Following the young boy’s death in Lanzhou, the internet rage machine was running at full capacity, with related hashtags on Weibo racking up hundreds of millions of views.

The government’s excessive Covid-19 prevention measures, and their censorship of posts related to the incident, caused anger. In some videos circulating online, city dwellers are seen taking to the streets in a show of resistance, shouting at public health workers and riot police.

Negative public feedback is unlikely to result in any immediate change for those hoping for a swift end to zero-covid. But if the economic situation does not improve and discontent grows, it could force the government to reevaluate its position — it has happened before.

Restricting measures against the Covid lockdown in Guangzhou, China, as announced by Beijing on social media after the November 5 pandemic

Residents under Covid lockdown in China’s southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou have torn down barriers meant to confine them to their homes, taking to the streets in defiance of strictly enforced local orders, according to video and images circulating on social media.

Some of the images show large crowds cheering and surging across toppled barriers and filling streets after dark in the city’s Haizhu district, which has been under an increasingly restrictive lockdown since November 5, as the epicenter of the city’s ongoing Covid outbreak.

The clanging sound of metal barriers falling reverberates across the neighborhood and mingles with cheers in the footage, in scenes multiple social media users said took place late Monday evening on district streets.

Zhang Yi, deputy director of the Guangzhou municipal health commission, told a news conference Monday that “pandemic containment measures” will be “enhanced” – a veiled reference for lockdowns – in the entirety of Liwan and Panyu districts, as well as parts of Haizhu and Yuexiu districts.

Top officials in Beijing, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, have pledged that the measures should be balanced with economic and social interests. Authorities last week revised the policy, including discouraging unnecessary mass testing and overly zealous classification of restricted “high risk” areas.

The time close contacts have to spend in centralQuarantine was reduced and the quarantining of secondary close contact was largely scrapped in order to further refine the policy.

Those measures came as Xi prepared for a week of diplomacy attending summits in Southeast Asia in a signal that China was ready to return to the world stage, with Xi meeting with key Western leaders in person this month for the first time since the pandemic began.

Guangzhou’s Haizhu district, where images showed nighttime protests, is home to a number of migrant workers living in densely packed buildings in areas known as “urban villages.”

Their circumstances can compound the hardship of the oppressive measures as the true number of residents needing supplies in a given housing block may be unclear to officials delivering goods. Those employed in factories and on construction sites can’t find remote work that preserves their income.

In messages shared on social media, observers noted hearing Haizhu residents originally from outside Guangzhou pleading for help from officials such as compensation for rent and free supplies.

A man in a video can be heard yelling that people in Hubei want to eat. Us Hubei people want to be unsealed!” The district has many migrant workers from another province in China. He is in a crowd that is facing Covid workers who are wearing hazmat suits.

In a separate clip of the same scene, another man asks the workers: “If your parents have gone sick, how would you feel? If your children are suffering from fever and prevented from leaving (for the hospital), how would you feel?”

In one video, a man in a suit who says he is the neighborhood director is being shouted out at by people who are desperate to hear what he has to say. One resident rushes forward to say that as non-local residents they’re left to queue for hours for Covid-19 testing and the meat sold to them by the government has gone bad, while they can’t get through to local support hotlines.

“Nobody came to explain and the community’s office line is always busy. And our landlord doesn’t care if we live or die. What should we do?” the resident says, while the other members of the crowd start to shout together: “Unseal! Unseal!

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/china/china-covid-guangzhou-protests-intl-hnk/index.html

Chaotic Covid Discontent Reopening and the Loss of a Grand Grandparent During a Video Chat with a Chinese Auto Dealer

The Haizhu district official acknowledged that the restrictions could have been announced earlier in the city and that more information was available about areas affected by the measures.

Zhou, an auto dealer in northeastern China, last saw his father alive in a video chat on the afternoon of November 1, hours after their home on the far outskirts of Beijing was locked down.

It was not until they realized the Covid restrictions had been imposed, that they realized that the apartment building where Zhou’s parents and his son resided did not have any cases.

The family found out the hard way, when Zhou’s father was denied immediate emergency medical help after he suddenly began struggling to breathe during the video call. Zhou said that Zhou and his son made many calls for an ambulance and that relatives were not allowed into the building to take the grandfather to the hospital.

Zhou said he contacted several state media outlets in Beijing to report on his story, but no reporters came. Despite knowing the risk of repercussions from the government, he turned to foreign media. CNN is only using his surname to mitigate that risk.

In the central city of Zhengzhou this week, workers at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly factory clashed with hazmat-suited security officers over a delay in bonus payment and chaotic Covid rules.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/china/china-zero-covid-discontent-reopening-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

Online zero concentration in the city of Chongqing: a hero speech to the censors and the economic tolls of the online lockdowns

A resident gave a speech in the southwest metropolis of Chongqing about the Covid blockade on his residential compound. I would rather die than have freedom. he shouted to a cheering crowd, who hailed him a “hero” and wrestled him from the grip of several police officers who had attempted to take him away.

These acts of defiance echoed an outpouring of discontent online, notably from Chinese football fans – many under some form of lockdown or restrictions – who have only been able to watch from home as tens of thousands of raucous fans pack stadiums at the World Cup in Qatar.

There are signs that Chinese officials feel the heat of growing public discontent and the heavy social and economic tolls inflicted by the widening lockdowns.

The Chinese government has released the guidelines to limit the disruption of zero-concentration rules on daily life and economy. It shortened theQuarantine from 10 days to eight days for close contacts of infectious people and inbound travelers. It removed restrictions on international flights, discouraged mass testing drives, and also scrapped the requirement to be in a secondary contact.

Instead of relaxing controls, many local officials are reverting to the zero-tolerance playbook, attempting to stamp out infections as soon as they flare up.

The northern city of Shijiazhuang was the one to cancel mass testing. It also allowed students to return to schools after a long period of online classes. But as cases rose over the weekend, authorities reimposed a lockdown on Monday, telling residents to stay home.

On Tuesday, financial hub Shanghai banned anyone arriving in the city from entering venues including shopping malls, restaurants, supermarkets and gyms for five days. Authorities also shut down cultural and entertainment venues in half of the city.

In Guangzhou, officials this week extended the lockdown on Haizhu district – where the protest took place – for the fifth time, and locked down its most populous Baiyun district.

In Beijing, streets in its largest district of Chaoyang are largely empty as authorities urged residents to stay home and ordered businesses to shut. The schools moved to online classes this week.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/china/china-zero-covid-discontent-reopening-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

Live-Posting the Chinese Anti-Democracy Protests: A Portrait of a 30-Year-Old Painter

Chinese officials have denied that the measures listed in the government guidelines are meant to be used to live with the virus.

The measures are meant to improve the prevention and control policy, Hongbing said last week. He said that they are not an easing of control.

The unprecedented protests that swept China late last month, posing the biggest challenge to leader Xi Jinping’s authority since he came to power, had a peculiar focal point: a Chinese Twitter account with a cat avatar.

The teacher Li is not your teacher account live-posted the protests in real time, showing just how quickly and widely the eruption of dissent swept across the country.

Behind the account is Li, a bespectacled 30-year-old painter, who spent most of his waking hours glued to a chair in front of a curved monitor and a pastel-colored keyboard – hundreds of thousands of miles away from the protests in a living room corner in Italy.

I didn’t have time to react. My only thought at the time was to document what was happening,” Li said. The influence is beyond my imagination. I didn’t expect the amount of clicks on my feed would happen in such a short time.

Li’s father knew what it was like to be on the wrong side of politics. He was made a “counter-revolutionary” when he was a child of a Nationalist army officer. He fled to the hills of southern China when he was a teenager because he was sick of the torment.

Last Saturday, Li received a call from his parents back home in eastern China, who told him that they had just had another police visit.

“As soon as I started to update Twitter, they called my parents to tell me to stop posting. At midnight, they went to our house to bother my parents.

Li told his parents he wasn’t working for anyone, and no money was involved. His father pleaded for him to “pull back from the brink” and stop posting.

When the Cultural Revolution broke in China in the 1960s and 1970s, he was admitted to a college as a worker-peasant-soldier student and stayed afterwards to work as an art teacher.

Since the brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests in 1989, “Don’t touch politics” has become a mantra for a generation of Chinese. The people of the country decided to give up their political freedoms for the sake of stability, material comfort and freedom in their lives as the country pivoted towards economic growth.

Li was very moved by their calls and had a toy that was from the Star Wars movies next to his chair when he was younger.

Li said he did not seek out politics – instead, like many young Chinese who took to the streets, he was unwittingly swept up by political currents. He said he was pushed along by the tides by chance, and was chosen by History to document an important chapter of it.

Liberal intellectuals, lawyers and journalists and other influential commentators led critical discussions on social issues – sometimes issuing scathing criticism or ridicule of officials.

A Chinese Twitter Teacher’s Tale of a Crowds “Picasso at the Circus”: How China Becomes More Critical of Society

By 2012, Li had become more critical of society. A young artist had his first exhibition at a gallery at the age of 19 in Jinan. He named it “Picasso at the Circus” – meant to “mock this absurd society, which is like a circus filled with funny animals,” according to an introduction of the event.

The freedom on Chinese social media was short-lived. Before Hu came to power, censorship began to tighten and the government began to crack down on free speech.

He lost his account on Weibo after retweeting a photograph of a 15-year-old Uyghur girl who was featured in an investigation of the police brutality against them in China. I wanted to be brave for her. It was well worth it,” he said on Twitter. I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight if I just sit by and not check her out.

After exhausting all the options to create new accounts, Li switched to TWo. He said it felt good, because you no longer have to use code names.

And so on November 26, when Li saw in his Twitter inbox a video showing crowds openly chanting “Xi Jinping, step down!” on the streets of Shanghai, under the close watch of police, he was dumbfounded.

“I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that I froze for a second when I heard the slogan. I told myself that if they dared to shout, I should document it. So I wrote it out word by word (in a Twitter post),” he said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

Li’s Facebook Profile: Life Has Come Into His Own: A Dramatic Change of the Global Pandemic Policy in China Revisited

Among the thousands of direct messages Li received in his inbox were death threats. “I get a lot of anonymous harassment saying I know who you are, where you live, and I will kill you,” he said.

He ignored them and focused on processing updates on the protests. When he left his computer, the negative thoughts came back to haunt him.

“This account is more important than my life,” he said. I will keep it going. If something bad happened to me, I have arranged for someone else to take over.

By the first week of December, the demonstrations had largely petered out. Some protesters received phone calls from the police telling them they should not take to the streets again, others were taken away for questioning, and some remained in jail.

But in a major victory for the protesters, China announced on Wednesday a dramatic overhaul of its pandemic policy, scrapping some of the most onerous restrictions in the clearest sign yet the government is moving away from its draconian zero-Covid policy.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

Zero-Covid is the Most Dangerous Cat on the Internet : A Comment on Lars Hamer’s Discourse on China’s Swine Flu

“When I saw people taking to the streets and holding up pieces of white paper, I knew I had to sacrifice something of myself, too,” he said. I am prepared even if authorities won’t let me see my parents again.

People from his home province can not differentiate the pronunciations of his last name and first name.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman made comments last year that foreign reporters should “chuckle to themselves”, if they want to live in China during the swine flu epidemic. The phrase has since been used widely on Chinese social media in a sarcastic way to criticize zero-Covid.

“The cat is now known to the Chinese diaspora around the world. But at the same time, it has also become the most dangerous cat on the Chinese internet,” he said.

The Editor-in-Chief of That’s is a guy named Lars Hamer. He has lived in Guangzhou, China since 2018. The views he expressed in this commentary are his own. Follow him on Twitter @LarsHamer1. Read more opinion on CNN.

The knock that every resident hates: The day of November 30, 2018, the city-momentum of disbelief in Guangzhou, China

It is the knock that every resident dreads. Early Tuesday morning, a sudden loud banging at the door of my apartment in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. I was frightened after learning that a neighbor had tested positive for Covid-19.health care workers in hazmat suits ordered everyone to go downstairs.

I had good reason to worry. One month ago, a teacher friend and his colleagues were sent to the centralized quark after a student at his school tested positive for Covid-19. I was worried that the same thing was about to happen to me.

Nothing of the sort was surprising to my surprise. I didn’t do well on the Covid-19 test. Before my result came out, I was completely free to leave my house and go about my day.

My friend and I would have both been labeled as close contact and powerless to escape the facility if this had happened just weeks before.

Over the next few days, the Guangzhou I came to in 2018 was almost back to normal. There were many people in the streets. Friends and families who had not seen each other for months gathered in bars and restaurants, and QR codes were being ripped down from walls; our movements no longer tracked.

The blocking of the fire exits in the event of a lock down is forbidden by the new measure. People who are in a relationship with someone can avoid each other at home. Quarantine facilities are soon to be a thing of the past.

Friends and families who had not seen each other for months gathered in bars and restaurants, and QR codes were being ripped down from walls; our movements no longer tracked.

Millions of people were stuck in their homes, non-essential businesses had closed, and I spent most days working late at night because it was the only thing I could do. I too began to feel fatigued and started considering leaving the country.

This world of restrictions was completely dismantled in the space of a few days. On November 30, the Covid-19 testing sites that for so long had dictated our movements were all closed. Businesses that were outside of high-risk areas would be allowed to resume after being locked down. The Covid-19 test is no longer required to enter them.

It was a moment of pure disbelief. The number of cases in Guangzhou on that day were similar to those that triggered the city-wide lock down in April.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/opinions/china-covid-restrictions-lifted-guangzhou-hamer/index.html

The Twitter Memetic Boards: Why People Don’t Think Wally? How Chinese Students Live and Learn to Write on Facebook, Twitter, and Twitter

State media have already begun trying to change everyone’s thinking by downplaying the lethality of the Omicron variant. A massive drive to immunize the elderly is under way.

Instagram has enjoyed more popularity than Twitter among Chinese with access to the global internet (sometimes via VPN) due to its initially apolitical, entertainment-heavy content. The meme boards featured the lives of study-abroad Chinese students as the number of Chinese users grew. The founders could not have imagined that their personal accounts would be radicalized by their followers. The pages can roughly be divided into two types: meme pages and nostalgic mood boards.