China’s strict censorship system is battling the onslaught of complaints from Shanghai as residents find creative ways to circumvent word bans, hashtags and even lyrics of the national anthem.
As the weeks-long lockdown in the city of 25 million led to widespread food shortages, supply shortages and deadly healthcare disruptions, the government has urged residents to harness “positive energy”. Dystopian banners warn people about it “Watch your own mouth or face punishment” and drones admonish residents. But far from inspiring residents to conform to the line, the methods have raised tensions.
On WeChat, groups have shared the names and stories of people who have either died with Covid or because lockdown has delayed their access to healthcare. They have slammed local authorities and China’s continued commitment to zero-Covid as the world opens up, sharing videos of residents being detained, bundled out of their homes or roughly manhandled by pandemic workers.
Many of these posts were quickly deleted, including an article by a leading Chinese health expert, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who cautiously urged China to back away from its zero-Covid commitment. Platforms have also censored videos of protests and outrage over the separation of Covid-positive children from their parents. A Caixin investigation into unreported deaths quickly disappeared.
In a video shared online, pandemic workers appeared to break into a man’s home to demand that he remove a critical post, while others claim so visited by the police because of her tweets. Weibo censored the term “buy vegetables in Shanghai” when people complained about food shortages (though one resident wryly remarked You could still post about buying cakes). On Sunday, the first line of the Chinese national anthem was – “Get up! These people who refuse to be slaves!” – has been banned as a hashtag.
But the plethora of banned items seems to challenge the censorship system and workers.
Last week, for a few hours before sunrise on Weibo, criticism of the state flowed unusually freely as users flooded the two most popular — and therefore sanctioned — hashtags with complaints. Under the themes “US is the country with the greatest human rights deficit” and “Shanghai addresses multiple rumors on Covid,” the posts were often sarcastic or satirical, and evaded bans by substituting “US” for “China” in their criticism. The posts stayed online for hours, prompting one person to joke that censorship must have escaped the pressures of China’s pervasive “996” culture of overhaul.
Food shortages are among factors causing discontent in Shanghai amid a long-running Covid lockdown. Photo: Chen Si/AP“People have lost faith”
Charlie Smith, the co-founder of censorship monitoring site GreatFire.com and who goes by a pseudonym, said part of the pushback could be attributed to it coming from Shanghainese who he says could “afford”. [more] openly because they’re not so attached to Beijing.” Shanghai, China’s commercial capital, is generally wealthier than other parts of the country and is home to a large middle class and a cohort of China’s business and academic elite, more of whom were foreign-educated.
“I think what happened in Shanghai would not happen in Beijing,” he said. “But something has definitely changed. People have lost trust in the government, they are unlikely to believe what the government is telling them and they will question the propaganda.”
Smith said there have been several recent events that have strained China’s censorship system.
“We went from the [February story of a Chinese woman found chained in a shed], to the war in Ukraine, to Covid in Shanghai in pretty quick succession. How far do they allow people to discuss these issues in depth?”
“You can’t fully censor these issues, and then the constant blaming of the US for everything seemed to break the camel’s back, so netizens turned the tables, and now the censorship is crawling.”
Dong Mengyu, a journalist who focuses on internet censorship, said the mechanics of censorship are the same as always, but “the creativity of contradiction poses challenges for censorship.”
“The amount of dissenting opinion reminds me of what we saw in the early days of Wuhan’s lockdown, particularly after the death of doctor Li Wenliang and the censorship of an essay about Dr. Ai Fen,” Dong said. Both had been fined for speaking out about the emerging virus. After the public outcry after his death, Li was later officially hailed as a hero.
challenge for Beijing
In a possible sign they need more tools, several social media platforms announced on Friday that they would soon be releasing users’ IP addresses to counter “the spread of rumours.”
In a post Friday, still online at the time of publication, a person hijacked the US human rights hashtag to mock a planned show by Chinese state media designed to “generate positive energy” by promoting “good” elements of the human rights movement highlighted lockdowns. The event was later canceled after online backlash.
“The epidemic has made the Chinese see much more clearly,” they wrote. “Chinese are obedient but not stupid”.
On Monday, the US human rights hashtag was still riddled with complaints as people posted photos from surveillance cameras installed in college dormitories as a “pandemic measure” of fake polls claiming people were living harder lives than any other in Russia or Ukraine a dog was beaten to death by disease workers over the removal of all residents (excluding pets) from a village northeast of Pudong to disinfect after a string of cases.
Smith said Chinese authorities had previously feared that simultaneous street protests erupting in different cities would challenge Beijing’s hold over the population. “I’m not sure if they ever considered that something similar could happen online, but it’s happening.”
Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin