China’s Latest Lockdown Shows Stubborn Resolve on Zero-Covid
New York Times
Alexandra Stevenson
Jan. 6, 2022
“The district security guards are like prison guards and we are like prisoners,” said Tom Zhao, a Xi’an resident. Mr. Zhao, 38, said he had joined dozens of chat groups last week searching for anyone who could help him find medicine for his mother, who has early-stage diabetes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/world/asia/china-xian-lockdown-covid.html
It is rather paradoxical that a man-made crisis magnified by the government in order to exert control becomes a mechanism for citizens to express and exert their independence.
China: Xi'an residents in lockdown trade for food amid shortage
3 hours ago
Some residents under quarantine in the Chinese city of Xi'an have resorted to bartering supplies in recent days, as worries of food shortages continue.
Posts on social media show residents swapping supplies and even tech gadgets in exchange for food.
About 13 million have been confined to their homes since 23 December, and presently cannot leave to buy food.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59864266
There seems to be a disconnect here. China is testing a digital currency throughout the nation, but residents of Xian have retrogressively resorted to a barbaric, barter economy. The people just trust barter. They neither trust a digital currency nor the government.
It must be disconcerting, to say the least, for Xian residents to become prisoners in their own apartments. No longer are prisons on the outskirts of the city. The city itself has become a giant prison. The prisoners are housed in smaller prisons called apartment buildings. Separate apartments of those buildings become cells. Using their cell phones the prisoners leave messages in a bottle, so to speak, which are transferred from cell towers in a random way to any other prisoner who will listen on their cell. These messages are also monitored and censored by wardens of the cell phone system.
Desperation as China’s locked down cities pay price of zero-Covid strategy
In another account posted to social media, a woman in labour lost her baby after she was prevented from entering a Xi’an hospital. In a since-deleted post, a relative described calling emergency services on the night of 1 January for their aunt after she started feeling pain, but the phone rang out.
Instead they sent her to hospital at around 8pm but “the front door security wouldn’t let us in, because the nucleic acid test result had been more than four hours ago”, they said.
“While she was waiting outside, I saw the video her husband sent me, she was holding the chair, struggling to sit on it, and her blood streamed down the chair and her pants.” They said hospital staff saw and brought her inside and to the operating room, but the child died.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/05/desperation-as-chinas-locked-down-cities-pay-price-of-zero-covid-strategy
Fundamentally, restrictions are in place not to control the virus, but to control the individual who may or may not have the virus. One is presumed guilty until proven innocent with a recent, nucleic acid test.
Distribution of free vegetables
Xi’an residents face shortages of food and critical supplies as lockdown continues
COVID-zero policies in Xi’an are tough after the recent outbreak. People are complaining on social media.
Jiayun Feng
December 29, 2021
As of today, the hashtag “It’s difficult to buy groceries in Xi’an” #西安买菜难# has been viewed over 290 million times on Weibo. Many Xi’an residents sought to tag news outlets, journalists, and other prominent individuals in their Weibo posts in the hopes that their messages would be shared widely and eventually answered.
Medical services appeared to be in a state of chaos, too. In a viral Weibo post (in Chinese), a university student in Xi’an documented the difficulties she faced while seeking treatment for her fever. She claimed that after she woke up with a high temperature on December 26, a total of six hospitals rejected her, citing concerns about taking in patients showing COVID symptoms. At the same time, her calls to multiple health departments and COVID hotlines went unanswered. After she shared her experience on Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A platform in China, she said that several community workers, who previously ignored her calls for medical assistance, asked her to delete the post. Eventually, the story was censored on Zhihu for reasons unbeknownst to her. “If these community workers keep focusing on controlling public opinion, playing the blame game, and deceiving people, instead of containing the spread of the virus, when will the outbreak in Xi’an end?” she wrote.
https://supchina.com/2021/12/29/xian-residents-face-shortages-of-food-and-critical-supplies-as-lockdown-continues/
It's difficult to buy groceries in Xian #西安买菜难#
To the author this means that people want to buy groceries rather than be given groceries. They want to maintain their dignity and their independence. Furthermore, they don't want to be placed in a situation of being given food in a crisis that seems to have been artificially created in order to foster submission to control.
On the other hand, if people really need help as in the case of a fever which may be COVID related or another life threatening disease then they don't want to be turned away at the doors of the hospital or worse, yet, not be able to get out of their apartment building in order to seek help. Ultimately, people know the difference between the artificial and the real. If they are in an artificial bubble then there may be a time when the bubble bursts.
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