These voices, tinged with raw frustration, anguish and despair, are among the audio montages featured in Voices of April, a video documenting the harsh effects of Shanghai’s nearly-month-long lockdown. The citywide lockdown, among the strictest the country has seen, has plunged the once-busy international financial hub into a virtual ghost town, leaving many of its 25 million residents confined to their homes with a lack of food, daily necessities and even medical access are.
“One month after the outbreak in Shanghai, I saw many people talking online, but most of them disappeared after a short time,” the video’s maker posted on WeChat on Friday. “However, some things should not have happened and they should not be forgotten.”
The personal plight, narrated in residents’ own voices and overlaid with black-and-white aerial footage of the city’s silent skyline and empty streets, touched the hearts of millions of Chinese netizens as the video spread like wildfire across social media on Friday. Media platforms spread evening.
But for the Chinese government, the six-minute clip – and the chaos and suffering it reveals – is too strong a reminder of the human cost of its zero-Covid policy, which authorities insist “people and their lives stand first”. .”
Censors quickly intervened, removing the film and all references to it from China’s Internet. Microblogging site Weibo even temporarily excluded the word “April” from search results.
The censorship caused an outcry. Many have been furious at the authorities’ attempt to erase what they see as objective documentation of the darker reality of lockdown – one seldom found in state media.
An online backlash ensued, with users defiantly joining a social media relay and sharing the video in any way they could to avoid censorship. Some posted the video upside down, others embedded it in cartoon clips, and still others distributed it via QR codes and cloud services. Censors struggled to keep up – the moment they blocked one version of the video, another reappeared, and the mouse-and-cat game continued into the early hours of Saturday morning.
Some even shared a clip of the song “Do You Hear the People Sing,” a protest anthem from the 2012 film Les Misérables.
The outburst of anger reminded many of the public outcry two years ago after the death of Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor who was fined by police for raising the coronavirus alarm, dying of Covid-19.
“They’re still trying to gag our mouths and plug our ears,” one user wrote in the comments section of Li’s Weibo page just after midnight on Saturday.
The online protest is the latest sign of growing dissatisfaction with tough Covid containment measures among residents of Shanghai, as well as people elsewhere in China, who have watched in horror as the crisis unfolds on social media.
But rather than easing lockdown measures, Shanghai authorities have stepped up determination to reduce cases outside designated quarantine locations to zero.
In the city’s Pudong district, epidemic prevention authorities ordered that communities under the strictest lockdown – namely those that have reported Covid cases in the past week – be put into “hard quarantine” before Sunday, according to an official directive, which is disseminated online. On Saturday, Chinese social media was flooded with photos of workers in white hazmat suits erecting green fences outside residential buildings in Shanghai.
The harsh new tactics have drawn more anger. “In such measures, fire protection is completely ignored. If a fire breaks out, rescue will not come in time, the consequences are unimaginable. Who is responsible then?” commented one Weibo user.
The dysfunction and chaos of the Shanghai lockdown has put residents in other cities on high alert.
In Beijing, residents rushed to buy groceries Sunday night amid a new coronavirus outbreak that officials described as “urgent and grim.” The Chinese capital recorded 19 new local cases on Sunday, bringing the total in the city to 60 since Friday.
Chaoyang, one of the city’s largest districts, announced it would conduct three rounds of mass testing for those who work and live in the district. Many fear stricter restrictions, such as a lockdown, could soon be implemented as more infections are detected.
Photos and videos shared online show long lines and empty shelves in Beijing supermarkets and “Sold Out” signs on grocery delivery apps. Articles have been circulating on Weibo and Wechat with advice on what kind of groceries and essentials to stock up on in the event of a lockdown.
The panic buying came despite Beijing officials assuring residents at a news conference earlier in the day that “the city’s market supply is adequate for daily necessities and trade is normal.”
“In Beijing’s fruit shops and supermarkets, everyone is buying hamsters. The section that sells instant noodles is completely empty,” a resident said on Weibo Monday. “The psychological shadow that Shanghai cast us may not go away for quite a while.”