Published on: 04/25/2022 – 17:30
The “Voices of April” video has become a phenomenon on Chinese social media since Friday. It allows you to hear brief testimonies from Shanghai residents who are fed up with being incarcerated for more than a month. Enough to highly irritate the Chinese censors.
A long six-minute panorama, black and white images of Shanghai from above, melancholic music and a series of short sound clips of residents chained to the breaking point.
As of this weekend, despite Beijing’s censorship, it’s impossible to escape the “Voices of April” video on Chinese social networks. This montage, posted online on Friday, April 23, is “since the death of Dr. Li Wenliang has become the most discussed content criticizing the authorities on the Internet [le médecin lanceur d’alerte mort du Covid-19 en février 2020]”, says What’s on Weibo, an English site about the news of the famous Chinese social network.
“It’s not the virus that kills, but hunger”
The tone of the video is set from the beginning. It starts with the fact that the health authorities in Shanghai assured in mid-March that they would never impose a quarantine on the “economically and socially too important” city.
Two weeks later, China’s main financial hub was completely shut down as part of the “zero Covid” policy defended by the Chinese government. But more than a month of strict containment has not yet allowed China to overcome the Omicron variant in Shanghai. As of Sunday, April 24, there were 19,000 new cases and fifteen deaths in this city of 26 million.
“Voices of April” makes it possible to better understand the magnitude of the human cost of the very strict lockdown imposed in Shanghai through recordings of telephone conversations. We hear a mother asking her neighbors if they have a certain medicine her son needs because she can’t buy it. Another resident is complaining to local authorities that his father – very ill – was not admitted to any hospital because they have to treat all Covid-19 patients as a priority. Another complains on the phone: “It’s not the virus that kills, it’s hunger!”.
But it’s not just the residents that we hear in these short excerpts. A trucker who has just arrived in Shanghai complains that he can’t find anyone for all the groceries he wants to deliver “alone to help people”. Local health service volunteers also express frustration at not being able to help everyone because they are overwhelmed.
>> To read on the observers: “They will starve”: In Shanghai residents “cannot see the end” of the ultra-strict detention.
These are not the only testimonies from local residents, and France 24 has been able to get in touch with some of them. But they are in Chinese, which works worst in the context of a “zero Covid” policy criticized by some scholars, including Zhong Nanshan, China’s Mr. Covid since 2020. Especially since it “was on all cell phones since Saturday morning, whether on the messaging service WeChat or on Weibo,” emphasizes What’s On Weibo.
A game of cat and mouse between censors and internet users
“This video has become a symbol of resistance to government health policies and has the potential to mobilize the population against the authorities,” said a Chinese political affairs expert, who preferred to remain anonymous.
Hence, in his opinion, the total censorship that the authorities quickly implemented. As of Saturday afternoon, all links to the video shared on the web pointed to 404 pages, indicating the content had been deleted. The British daily The Guardian also says the term “Voices of April” should no longer be used on social media.
After all, censorship is a tradition in a country like China, where the Internet is very tightly controlled. But this time, Chinese “netizens” seem determined not to let it go. “Do you want war? You will have it! You will not succeed in censoring the entire unified population of Shanghai,” said one surfer.
The video’s name was initially changed in hopes of escaping the vigilance of China’s Big Brother. “Voices of April” became “Voices of Shanghai”. A subterfuge that wasn’t long enough to fool censors, used in the past to flushing out very creative forms of criticism against Xi Jinping (like using the character of Winnie the Pooh to look like the Chinese leader, to denounce him the regime).
In this cat-and-mouse game, internet users then found other solutions, says the Guardian. Some modified the lyrics of famous poems to include references to “Voices of April,” while others posted simple QR codes that, once scanned, allowed the now-famous montage to be viewed.
In the face of these efforts to spread the viral video, it seems that the censors have not yet managed to oust this content from every corner of the Chinese web, notes the Chinese expert contacted by France 24.
The Chinese regime has therefore decided to mobilize the very influential Global Times to counterattack on a daily basis. Hu Xijin, its former editor-in-chief, attempted to justify Weibo’s censorship by stating “that it was a sign that the authorities had “heard the criticism from the people of Shanghai, “after being detained for a long time, need” a channel for self-expression”.
The Chinese authorities are caught in the crossfire. They don’t want to appear insensitive to the suffering of the residents of Shanghai who are still incarcerated. Especially since they have never denied that the “zero Covid” policy requires sometimes drastic measures. But they consider it all the more impossible to circulate such first-hand statements, since the discovery of a source of infection in Beijing is now seriously considering a possible isolation of the Chinese capital.