In Shanghai, his acts of rebellion multiply in reaction to the censorship of a video. But everything takes place online, since the city is confined. China’s economic capital, populated by 25 million people, is facing its worst outbreak of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. In response, the authorities, followers of the “zero Covid” strategy, unsurprisingly imposed strict confinement on the inhabitants. It is the consequences of this confinement that the video entitled “Siyue zhi-sheng” (“the voices of April”) denounced in a long six-minute sequence shot of Shanghai filmed from the air.
The video is accompanied by around twenty sound clips: confined residents who cannot get food, medicine or get to the hospital, a man prevented from returning to his confined neighborhood, or yet another woman describing the chaos in quarantine centers.
The video also included statements from politicians saying, at the start of the outbreak in March, that a short precautionary lockdown was undesirable, due to its economic repercussions. This initial hesitation led to the explosion in the number of positive cases, which finally triggered the current confinement which is expected to last for many weeks. It was massively shared on Friday evening on the WeChat social network. But in a few hours, the censors managed to erase all traces of it. Or how to aggravate the popular sling in a tense health context.
“The author just presents raw facts. There is nothing provocative!” annoyed this Saturday a user of the social network Weibo, where discussions on the subject are almost completely censored. “This video is nothing special. Its contents were already known. But the fact of seeing that even that is censored, it bothers me. That’s why I reposted it on my thread.wrote another user.
As a sign of discontent, many Internet users shared music videos of two songs with protesting lyrics on WeChat: Do You Hear the People Sing? (from the musical wretched) and Another Brick In the Wall (from the group Pink Floyd). The first is a call to rebellion. The second criticizes in particular the “thought control”.
The Ministry of Health announced this Saturday twelve new deaths and more than 23,000 new positive cases in Shanghai. This is a rebound of almost 6,000 cases from the previous day. Local authorities attribute this new increase in particular to overcrowding in certain old residential buildings, where kitchens and toilets are shared.