AFP, published on Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 15:21
A viral video showing the effects of detention in Shanghai on its residents was deleted from the Chinese internet by censors on Saturday, sparking misunderstanding and even anger among netizens.
China’s economic capital of 25 million people is facing the worst outbreak of Covid-19 since the pandemic began.
The Health Ministry announced 12 new deaths and more than 23,000 new positive cases in Shanghai on 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.
Almost all Shanghainese have been housebound since early April. Many residents struggle to get fresh groceries and see a doctor.
The six-minute video titled “Siyue zhi sheng” (“Voices of April”) is a long sequence shot of Shanghai filmed from the air.
The author has complemented these black and white images in chronological order with a series of sounds from press conferences, videos posted on social networks or phone calls from local residents.
The video begins with the voices of politicians declaring at the start of the outbreak in March that a short pre-emptive lockdown is undesirable due to 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.
The video presents the impact with about twenty sound clips: locked-in residents unable to get food, medicine or go to the hospital; a man prevented from returning to his close quarters; or a woman describing the chaos in quarantine centers.
The clip was massively shared and seen on social network WeChat on Friday night. But the censors managed to erase all traces of it in a few hours.
“The author only presents bare facts. There’s nothing provocative about it!” said a user of the social network Weibo on Saturday, where discussions on the topic are almost completely censored.
“This video is nothing special. Its content was already known. But it bothers me to see that this is also being censored. So I reposted it to my feed,” wrote another user.
As a sign of dissatisfaction, many netizens shared on WeChat music videos of two songs with protesting lyrics: “Can You Hear People Singing?” (from the musical Les Miserables) and “Another Brick In The Wall” (by the band Pink Floyd).
The first is a call to rebellion. The second specifically criticizes “mind control”.
The video remains viewable on YouTube, a site that is not accessible from mainland China without bypass software (VPN).
Many Shanghainese have castigated various logistical hiccups and Kafkaesque situations arising from the application of health measures on Chinese social networks in recent weeks.
While many videos are censored, they often aren’t censored quickly enough to prevent them from going viral.
China justifies its anti-Covid strategy with the desire to limit the number of deaths as much as possible. Officially, fewer than 5,000 deaths have been recorded since the pandemic began.