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.
