Shanghai Residents Protest Lockdown With Marches, Smashed Vegetables and Art Projects
By Wenxin Fan, May 2, 2022, WSJ
On Saturday, locals in one district found a government storage site
full of vegetables that had rotted rather than being delivered to
hungry families and smashed them in the street. In a western suburb,
dozens of residents took to the streets twice over the weekend to
protest continuing shortages of food. Across the city, many residents
staged small, personal protests by refusing to line up for the repeated, compulsory Covid-19 tests.
Food shortages have been one of the major complaints during the
lockdown in Shanghai, one of China’s wealthiest cities. The evening of April 28, sounds of bashing bowls and wash basins reverberated around
many apartment buildings in a synchronized protest that organizers
called “concerts.”
On Saturday, the city said it wouldn’t tolerate mistakes when it
came to food supplies and would punish negligence or failure by officials.
The intensifying expressions of discontent show the growing impatience
in parts of the country with strict Covid-19 control measures that have trapped some people for weeks and have undercut economic growth. While
the central government led by President Xi Jinping has doubled down on
the strategy, asserting China can beat the virus, some top-level health officials fear the strategy is unsustainable.
Shanghai, which had experimented with more targeted restrictions,
has since been required to crack down on what had been a fast-spreading outbreak amid a relatively affluent population accustomed to more
latitude. The protests are an indication of the pressure Mr. Xi is
under to show his policy can work.
Shanghai reported fewer than 7,000 new cases Monday, down from over
20,000 just over a week ago. The decline in cases has allowed some
easing of restrictions. As of Sunday, Shanghai health officials said
over 15 million people in the city could leave home and buy groceries
and medicines in designated stores. Restrictions could be eased further
in districts where the average number of new cases drops to less than
1 for every 100,000 residents, the city said.
Most families in the city center can only send one person out twice
a week, though they can generally stroll around their compounds. At
least 2.76 million people in Shanghai were still under strict lockdowns
at home as of Sunday.
Residents in the northern subdistrict of Zhangmiao were among the
ones enjoying the limited freedom and strolling around their low-rise apartment buildings, when on Saturday a man wearing checkered pajamas reached over a wall into white Styrofoam boxes of rotting vegetables.
Other residents filmed the scene and complained about the smell of the cabbages and beans, asking why they had never been distributed.
The man broke through a loose gate and found even more boxes.
A crowd of residents smashed the rotten vegetables in the street
and pointed them out to a policeman in a white protective suit,
who promised to investigate. As the video spread online, so did
anger among residents who had relied on their grass-roots officials
to make food available during lockdowns. Elsewhere in Zhangmiao,
residents stopped a truck coming out of a government office and
found fruit covered up with black garbage bags. Another group
stormed into a local government office, where they filmed boxes
of rice and cooking oil piled on the ground and asked whether
officials had been stealing the supplies.
As night fell, a small mob gathered in the street and surrounded
Huang Yixin, the head of the subdistrict, who had come out escorted
by police to address the complaints. Speaking through a loudspeaker,
Mr. Huang promised to get to the bottom of the complaints and reminded residents to check the official announcement on the next distribution
of “gift bags” containing food and other supplies.
On Sunday, the city fired three lower-ranking Zhangmiao officials
for being slow to distribute food.
Some protests have taken abstract forms. After a student at Tongji University typed out a complaint about the quality of the pork in
lines of characters that alternated between red and blue, art
students at the school began circulating posters with themes of
red and blue stripes, a subtle reference to the complaint that
didn’t have to repeat the words.
Two videos of local musicians playing “Do You Hear the People Sing?” were shared tens of thousands of times before they were deleted online.
The song, from the 1980 musical “Les Misérables,” has been popular in many social movements, including the 2019 antigovernment protests in
Hong Kong.
Residents in Jinze, an ancient town of canals and bridges that is a
suburb of Shanghai, were more blunt. The town’s many elderly and
migrant renters lacked access to the delivery services that had
helped urban residents survive. After their social-media pleas for
help went unanswered amid a flood of demands for aid, dozens of
Jinze residents marched down a street Saturday night demanding food.
A video of the protest, verified by The Wall Street Journal in
interviews with residents, was quickly deleted from social-media
platforms.
On Sunday, the town started to issue tickets that allowed some
residents to go out for three hours a day on foot. A middle-aged
man who came out of a supermarket holding a piece of pork loudly
accused the retailer of selling food rations because the meat
carried a stamp from another province. The incident triggered
another small protest: When a police car arrived, a woman lay
down on it as officers in white protective gear dragged the man away.
The Jinze government released a detailed video Sunday evening of
the stamp on the meat and invoices, explaining the meat was properly distributed and warning residents against believing rumors.
Two weeks ago, a group of residents in Shanghai’s Pudong district
clashed with police after their rented apartments were seized by
the city to be used as a quarantine facility.
Others have refused to participate in the repetitive rounds of
PCR tests mandated by health officials. Wang Lei, a 36-year-old
Shanghai native in the downtown Huangpu district, told his
neighborhood chat room that he was going to skip some of the
Covid tests downstairs, arguing they were in conflict with the
city’s own rule that says residents in buildings with recent
infections can get tested at home.
His posts led to a visit by several police officers. In an
exchange through a closed metal gate that he filmed and later
posted online, the police read aloud his ID details and accused
Mr. Wang of inciting trouble but left without further action.
Mr. Wang couldn’t be reached for comment.
In the same district, police kicked down the wooden door of a
young woman’s apartment after she refused to go with them to
quarantine. The woman, whose handle on the Twitter-like service
Weibo is “Bushi Erliu”—“Not Second Class” in Chinese—filmed the episode and posted it online with a detailed account of her story.
She said she hadn’t been taking Covid tests for many days until
the government flipped her health app to yellow, restricting her
ability to take public transportation. In panic, she took a test
in a hospital that came back positive but needed to be reviewed.
She didn’t respond to requests for comments. In the video, a
policeman kicked her old wooden door multiple times, eventually
breaking through and taking the woman to quarantine. The woman
compared the experience to the infamous bathroom scene in “The
Shining,” when Jack Nicholson chops through the door to get to
his cowering wife and son. The police later fixed the door,
the woman said in her post.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/shanghai-residents-protest-lockdown-with-marches-smashed-vegetables-and-art-projects-11651483851
On Tuesday, May 17, 2022 at 5:26:42 AM UTC+8, David P. wrote:hospitals and enclosed spaces to ensure they can keep each other from infection and under control.
Shanghai Residents Protest Lockdown With Marches, Smashed Vegetables and Art Projects
By Wenxin Fan, May 2, 2022, WSJ
On Saturday, locals in one district found a government storage site
full of vegetables that had rotted rather than being delivered to
hungry families and smashed them in the street. In a western suburb, dozens of residents took to the streets twice over the weekend to
protest continuing shortages of food. Across the city, many residents staged small, personal protests by refusing to line up for the repeated, compulsory Covid-19 tests.
Food shortages have been one of the major complaints during the
lockdown in Shanghai, one of China’s wealthiest cities. The evening of April 28, sounds of bashing bowls and wash basins reverberated around
many apartment buildings in a synchronized protest that organizers
called “concerts.”
On Saturday, the city said it wouldn’t tolerate mistakes when it
came to food supplies and would punish negligence or failure by officials.
The intensifying expressions of discontent show the growing impatience
in parts of the country with strict Covid-19 control measures that have trapped some people for weeks and have undercut economic growth. While
the central government led by President Xi Jinping has doubled down on
the strategy, asserting China can beat the virus, some top-level health officials fear the strategy is unsustainable.
Shanghai, which had experimented with more targeted restrictions,
has since been required to crack down on what had been a fast-spreading outbreak amid a relatively affluent population accustomed to more latitude. The protests are an indication of the pressure Mr. Xi is
under to show his policy can work.
Shanghai reported fewer than 7,000 new cases Monday, down from over
20,000 just over a week ago. The decline in cases has allowed some
easing of restrictions. As of Sunday, Shanghai health officials said
over 15 million people in the city could leave home and buy groceries
and medicines in designated stores. Restrictions could be eased further
in districts where the average number of new cases drops to less than
1 for every 100,000 residents, the city said.
Most families in the city center can only send one person out twice
a week, though they can generally stroll around their compounds. At
least 2.76 million people in Shanghai were still under strict lockdowns
at home as of Sunday.
Residents in the northern subdistrict of Zhangmiao were among the
ones enjoying the limited freedom and strolling around their low-rise apartment buildings, when on Saturday a man wearing checkered pajamas reached over a wall into white Styrofoam boxes of rotting vegetables. Other residents filmed the scene and complained about the smell of the cabbages and beans, asking why they had never been distributed.
The man broke through a loose gate and found even more boxes.
A crowd of residents smashed the rotten vegetables in the street
and pointed them out to a policeman in a white protective suit,
who promised to investigate. As the video spread online, so did
anger among residents who had relied on their grass-roots officials
to make food available during lockdowns. Elsewhere in Zhangmiao,
residents stopped a truck coming out of a government office and
found fruit covered up with black garbage bags. Another group
stormed into a local government office, where they filmed boxes
of rice and cooking oil piled on the ground and asked whether
officials had been stealing the supplies.
As night fell, a small mob gathered in the street and surrounded
Huang Yixin, the head of the subdistrict, who had come out escorted
by police to address the complaints. Speaking through a loudspeaker,
Mr. Huang promised to get to the bottom of the complaints and reminded residents to check the official announcement on the next distribution
of “gift bags” containing food and other supplies.
On Sunday, the city fired three lower-ranking Zhangmiao officials
for being slow to distribute food.
Some protests have taken abstract forms. After a student at Tongji University typed out a complaint about the quality of the pork in
lines of characters that alternated between red and blue, art
students at the school began circulating posters with themes of
red and blue stripes, a subtle reference to the complaint that
didn’t have to repeat the words.
Two videos of local musicians playing “Do You Hear the People Sing?” were shared tens of thousands of times before they were deleted online. The song, from the 1980 musical “Les Misérables,” has been popular in many social movements, including the 2019 antigovernment protests in
Hong Kong.
Residents in Jinze, an ancient town of canals and bridges that is a
suburb of Shanghai, were more blunt. The town’s many elderly and
migrant renters lacked access to the delivery services that had
helped urban residents survive. After their social-media pleas for
help went unanswered amid a flood of demands for aid, dozens of
Jinze residents marched down a street Saturday night demanding food.
A video of the protest, verified by The Wall Street Journal in
interviews with residents, was quickly deleted from social-media platforms.
On Sunday, the town started to issue tickets that allowed some
residents to go out for three hours a day on foot. A middle-aged
man who came out of a supermarket holding a piece of pork loudly
accused the retailer of selling food rations because the meat
carried a stamp from another province. The incident triggered
another small protest: When a police car arrived, a woman lay
down on it as officers in white protective gear dragged the man away.
The Jinze government released a detailed video Sunday evening of
the stamp on the meat and invoices, explaining the meat was properly distributed and warning residents against believing rumors.
Two weeks ago, a group of residents in Shanghai’s Pudong district clashed with police after their rented apartments were seized by
the city to be used as a quarantine facility.
Others have refused to participate in the repetitive rounds of
PCR tests mandated by health officials. Wang Lei, a 36-year-old
Shanghai native in the downtown Huangpu district, told his
neighborhood chat room that he was going to skip some of the
Covid tests downstairs, arguing they were in conflict with the
city’s own rule that says residents in buildings with recent
infections can get tested at home.
His posts led to a visit by several police officers. In an
exchange through a closed metal gate that he filmed and later
posted online, the police read aloud his ID details and accused
Mr. Wang of inciting trouble but left without further action.
Mr. Wang couldn’t be reached for comment.
In the same district, police kicked down the wooden door of a
young woman’s apartment after she refused to go with them to
quarantine. The woman, whose handle on the Twitter-like service
Weibo is “Bushi Erliu”—“Not Second Class” in Chinese—filmed the
episode and posted it online with a detailed account of her story.
She said she hadn’t been taking Covid tests for many days until
the government flipped her health app to yellow, restricting her
ability to take public transportation. In panic, she took a test
in a hospital that came back positive but needed to be reviewed.
She didn’t respond to requests for comments. In the video, a
policeman kicked her old wooden door multiple times, eventually
breaking through and taking the woman to quarantine. The woman
compared the experience to the infamous bathroom scene in “The Shining,” when Jack Nicholson chops through the door to get to
his cowering wife and son. The police later fixed the door,
the woman said in her post.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/shanghai-residents-protest-lockdown-with-marches-smashed-vegetables-and-art-projects-11651483851These measures implemented had produced results and now people in Shanghai is relieved to be able to go out as usual except that they have to maintain social distancing and masking and other essential mass testing requirements such as in offices and
David P. wrote:hospitals and enclosed spaces to ensure they can keep each other from infection and under control.
Shanghai Residents Protest Lockdown With Marches, Smashed Vegetables and Art ProjectsThese measures implemented had produced results and now people in Shanghai is relieved to be able to go out as usual except that they have to maintain social distancing and masking and other essential mass testing requirements such as in offices and
By Wenxin Fan, May 2, 2022, WSJ
[...] https://www.wsj.com/articles/shanghai-residents-protest-lockdown-with-marches-smashed-vegetables-and-art-projects-11651483851
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