In the garb of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic the Chinese Communist Party CCP is using the Shanghai lockdown to implement the most draconian of its surveilla
Shanghai [China], May 7 (ANI): In the garb of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using the Shanghai lockdown to implement the most draconian of its surveillance and authoritarian systems, the kinds of which were only seen in far-off provinces like Xinjiang till now. Since April, the 25 million residents of Shanghai have gotten a small taste of the Xinjiang treatment in a strict citywide lockdown, the New York Times reported, highlighting the people lining up for rounds of COVID-19 tests to prove they are virus-free, a pandemic corollary to Uyghurs lining up at checkpoints to prove they don’t pose any security threat. Residents in both places are subject to social control and surveillance. Instead of re-education camps in Xinjiang, about half a million Shanghai residents who tested positive were sent to quarantine camps. “Shanghai lockdown is a stress test of social control,” Wang Lixiong, an author of books on Xinjiang, Tibet, and surveillance, was quoted as saying. “If the authority can control a complex society like Shanghai, it can control any place in China,” Wang said. Wang himself has been locked down in Shanghai since March. He fears an even more dystopian China than what it is today: a digital totalitarian regime that surveils everyone, makes each neighborhood an on-site concentration camp, and controls the society with the same iron fist in a future crisis, be it war, famine, climate disaster or economic meltdown, the report said.
