Array
A spokesperson for the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) warned the Chinese Communist Party on Tuesday that abruptly ending Chinese coronavirus lockdown restrictions would be “really, really hard,” advising against sudden lockdowns in general because they are difficult to end.
The Chinese government has been implementing a policy it calls “zero-Covid” – which mandates rolling, city-wide lockdowns and imprisoning thousands of people in quarantine camps – since the beginning of the pandemic. The ongoing medical emergency began in late 2019 in central Wuhan, China, where Communist Party officials first began welding people shut in their homes and killing them with starvation or lack of medicine.
“Zero-Covid” has prompted increasingly frequent protests against the Communist Party – largely unheard of since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – that climaxed in a wave of anti-regime protests in the country’s biggest cities in late November. While Chinese citizens had engaged in small acts of dissent consistently for over a year, the last weekend in November saw hundreds take the streets simultaneously in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Guangzhou, and other major urban areas. Many held up blank pieces of paper, representing what the government allows them to legally say in public.
In response, Chinese officials have launched a brutal wave of repression against protesters and defense lawyers who may consider taking up a protester case. They have also, however, simultaneously announced that they would no longer implement “large-scale” lockdowns – reserving the right to isolate residential complexes and neighborhoods, but not entire cities – and that those with asymptomatic or mild Chinese coronavirus infections will no longer be imprisoned in a camp.
NOT AGAIN: China’s southern economic hub of Shenzhen began a coronavirus lockdown on Monday, jeopardizing major foreign business operations and trapping some 24 million residents inside the surrounding province.
