Residents of the Chinese city, who have been locked up since April due to an outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, are now unnerved by the censorship of a video denouncing their living conditions.
In Shanghai, his rebellious acts escalate in response to a video being censored. But everything takes place online as the city is limited. China’s economic capital of 25 million people is facing the worst outbreak of Covid-19 since the pandemic began. In response, the authorities, supporters of the “zero Covid” strategy, unsurprisingly imposed strict lockdown restrictions on residents. Such are the consequences of this detention, which denounced the video titled “Siyue zhi sheng” (“The Voices of April”) in a long six-minute aerial sequence filmed from Shanghai.
The video is accompanied by around twenty sound clips: caged residents unable to get food, medicine or hospital, a man prevented from returning to his caged neighborhood, or another woman describing the chaos in quarantine centers.
The video also included statements from politicians who said at the start of the outbreak in March that a brief precautionary lockdown was undesirable because of its economic impact. This initial hesitation led to an explosion in the number of positive cases that eventually triggered the current lockdown, which is expected to last for many weeks. It was shared massively on the social network WeChat on Friday evening. But in a few hours the censors managed to erase all traces of it. Or how to aggravate the popular noose in a strained healthcare context.
“The author presents only bare facts. There’s nothing provocative about it!” angered a user of the social network Weibo this Saturday, where discussions on the subject are almost completely censored. “This video is nothing special. Its content was already known. But the fact that even that is censored bothers me. So I reposted it in my thread,” wrote another user.
As a sign of dissatisfaction, many netizens shared music videos of two songs with protesting lyrics on WeChat: Do You Hear the People Sing? (from the musical Les Miserables) and Another Brick In the Wall (from Pink Floyd). The first is a call to rebellion. The second castigates “mind control” in particular.
The Ministry of Health announced twelve new deaths and more than 23,000 new positive cases in Shanghai this Saturday. This is a rebound of nearly 6,000 cases from the previous day. Local authorities attribute this renewed increase in particular to promiscuity in certain old residential buildings where kitchens and toilets are shared.