Since the beginning of April, the 25 million inhabitants of the Chinese economic metropolis can hardly leave their homes. In this way, the authorities want to contain the worst outbreak of CoV since the beginning of the pandemic.
However, the authorities are hardly able to cushion the consequences for those who are in fact imprisoned: the city is struggling to provide its residents with fresh food or to receive medical care because the healthcare system is mainly needed for corona tests and treatments.
Deserted city and sound documents
The video, posted by an anonymous account, deftly addresses these issues: Simple black-and-white aerial photos of deserted Shanghai are initially accompanied by statements to the press in which officials still assure at the start of the outbreak in March that they were implementing a lockdown on the metropolis rejected because of the economic impact.
This is followed by audio recordings of complaints from a man whose sick father is not being treated in a hospital, a woman who cannot return home after chemotherapy in the hospital, or a mother who asks neighbors for antipyretics for her mid-term baby. of the night begging
Cat and mouse game with censors
Censors took hours on Saturday to delete the video from online networks because users kept uploading it to multiple cloud servers.
Users then reacted indignantly to the deletion: “The video only shows bare facts. There is nothing provocative,” one of them criticized. “The content is not new – but the fact that even this is being censored worries me,” wrote another.
Poorly disguised protest messages
As of Saturday afternoon, the video, titled “Voice of April,” continued to appear on YouTube, but was no longer available on any of China’s major online platforms. In protest, netizens shared video clips of the songs “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “Another Brick In The Wall” on the short message service WeChat: The first song of the musical “Les Miserables” calls for rebellion, while Pink Floyd Classics, among other things, against “mind control”.
In its current annual report, the American humanitarian organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticizes the fact that the Chinese leadership has misused the pandemic to further increase the repression against its own population.