“Even friends in other cities in China didn’t know the actual situation in Shanghai,” he says. “I’m surprised to learn how big the information asymmetry is,” he says. He blames Shanghai government officials for mismanaging the situation and believes a number of people in his neighborhood have died of starvation, although that has not been reported anywhere. The most damning posts, about people committing suicide, for example, have been scrubbed by the country’s internet censors, says the Shanghai investor. In December, Weibo was fined 3 million yuan ($470,000) for allowing unspecified illegal content to slip through its net. Companies like Weibo have a financial incentive to get this right. While the Chinese government employs its own censors, the country’s social media companies also have teams of moderators who remove content that the Chinese Communist Party considers to be illegal. But the Shanghai lockdown is demonstrating the cat-and-mouse dynamics that are central to social media censorship, even in a country that devotes huge resources to wiping the internet clean from dissent.ĭespite sometimes being overwhelmed, the censors have not given up attempting to contain harrowing stories about the lockdown and anger aimed at politicians or China’s zero-Covid policy. Back in 2013, state media said around 2 million people were employed to track content posted online, and Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, says censorship has become stricter since then. In response, residents are dodging China’s notorious online censorship system to document their experiences and vent their anger on sites that include Twitter-equivalent Weibo, the ubiquitous messaging app WeChat, and the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin.Ĭhina has one of the world’s most advanced internet filtering and censorship apparatuses, known as the Great Firewall. The situation became desperate as supplies of food ran short days after the lockdown was enforced, and some people were denied access to medical care. You probably won’t find, for instance, a shocking video of pandemic workers clubbing a pet corgi to death after its owners were taken away to be quarantined, although there are references to the infamous incident, which became a symbol of the harsh lockdown conditions. There are fewer signs of the collective outrage, anger, and desperation that has gripped the city’s 26 million residents, who have been confined to their homes since April 5 and are struggling to get hold of food and medicine. Lockdowns early in the pandemic, like the one in Wuhan, were easier for residents to understand, Hu said, as there was little known about the virus or how to treat it.If you search the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo for “Shanghai lockdown” (“上海封城”), you’ll find plenty of videos of deserted streets and emergency workers delivering food. Recent outbreaks across the country have led to lockdowns and other measures affecting hundreds of millions of people, although officials appear to be trying to avoid a full lockdown in Beijing, the capital, where there is a much smaller outbreak than in Shanghai. But that approach has been challenged by the highly contagious omicron variant of the virus. “How many people died or suffered from a non-Covid condition as they couldn’t get the care they used to have, including for mental health?” said Hu, whose colleagues have themselves been driving around the city delivering medication to patients.Ĭhinese officials say their strict “zero-Covid” strategy, which has kept virus cases and deaths far lower than in the United States and other countries, is necessary to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed. ![]() Residents have struggled with anger, frustration and feelings of hopelessness, he said, as well as fears that their pre-existing mental conditions could be exacerbated by social isolation and lack of access to professional care. ![]() “Nobody was unaffected,” George Hu, president of the Shanghai International Mental Health Association, told NBC News.
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