The shouts of locked-down residents demanding basic necessities, the cries of babies separated from their parents in quarantine, the pleas of a son repeatedly rejected by hospitals to treat his critically ill father, and the sobs of an exhausted local official who admits there is "no good policy" coming from higher authorities for her to explain to residents.
But for the Chinese government, the six-minute clip -- and the chaos and suffering it exposes -- is too powerful a reminder of the human cost of its zero-Covid policy, which authorities insist are "putting the people and their lives first." An online backlash ensued, with users joining a social media relay in defiance, sharing the video in whatever way they can come up with to evade censors. Some posted the video upside down, others embedded it in cartoon clips, and some circulated it through QR codes and cloud services. Censors struggled to keep up -- no sooner would they block one version of the video did another resurface, and the mouse and cat game continued into the small hours of Saturday.
"They are still trying to gag our mouths and plug our ears," a user wrote in the comment section of Li's Weibo page shortly after midnight on Saturday. In the city's Pudong district, epidemic prevention authorities ordered "hard quarantine" to be installed in communities under the strictest level of lockdown -- namely those which reported Covid cases over the past week -- before Sunday, according to an official directive circulating online. On Saturday, Chinese social media was flooded with photos of workers in white hazmat suits installing green fences outside apartment buildings in Shanghai.
...'The-CNN-Wire'... Nice and easy copy pasta job, eh?