“Have those responsible who pressed the pause button for Xi’an ever thought about how they would influence the fate of 13 million people?” This sentence comes from an online diary about the situation in the city of Xi ‘, which has been sealed off for almost two weeks. on. Local journalist Jiang Xue’s recordings were among the most widely read texts on the Chinese Internet on Tuesday. It’s about people who fell through the cracks when the authorities paralyzed the entire city to stop the spread of the coronavirus. For example, people sitting on the street because their apartment block was cordoned off during their working hours. About a migrant worker who is said to have walked 90 kilometers to his home village for fear of the costs of a forced quarantine. A man who was beaten up by the guards on his neighborhood committee for leaving his home illegally to get something to eat. The attackers were later fined by the police.
The diary is also about a young woman whose father succumbed to a heart attack after his daughter said he was turned away from a hospital because corona cases were reported in his residential area. Jiang Xue tells these stories in order to contrast them with the official discourse of the victory over the virus and the anticipatory cheers from nationalist Internet users. “No matter what the big story ends up being, tonight the city mourns with this girl who has lost her father.”
Between encouragement and contradiction
A similar case broke out on Tuesday and sparked outrage on the internet. Accordingly, a heavily pregnant woman was denied access to the hospital because she could only show an expired corona test. However, the veracity of the report cannot be verified.
For days now, calls for help and complaints have been circulating on the Internet from people who are in danger of running out of supplies. The city administration is apparently unable to cope with the task of supplying eleven million citizens with food and medication that are not allowed to leave their homes. Some people report that they have been eating instant noodles for a week. Sometimes they get encouragement, sometimes they are insulted as unpatriotic. One who complained that the authorities had advised against buying hamsters before the lockdown was told, “Why are you screaming like that? Others suffer in silence. You bring trouble to your country. Your case is cited on anti-China websites abroad. ”Women who ask for tampons and pads are accused by some of spreading feminist ideology.
The plight in Xi’an once again brings to light the conflicts in Chinese society. Many critical voices are deleted by the censors, which only increases displeasure with the situation. “Shocking that the government spends half of its energy on deleting Internet entries,” writes one user. Some reports on state television arouse suspicion, such as a stealth video in which helpers throw food bags at each other that could have been transported by car.
Another big city is closing
Nobody will starve to death in Xi’an, but they will go hungry. This is probably also due to the fact that the commercial food suppliers who otherwise supply China’s city dwellers are also not allowed to leave their homes. The journalist Jiang Xue reports in her diary of friends who wanted to appeal to the local government to let the market and private aid initiatives take care of the population. But in the end no one dared to put his name under it.
An end to the lockdown is not in sight. The authorities said it would only be lifted if new infections were only discovered in isolated contact persons. Since the outbreak began on December 9, around 1,600 corona cases have been reported in the old imperial city of Xi’an, and on Tuesday, for the first time in days, fewer than a hundred new infections. The supply situation is also gradually easing. Images of vegetables delivered are circulating on the Internet. But there are still requests to speak like this: “The supermarket is 50 meters from my house, but I am not allowed to go there. The government distributes food for free, but only to homeowners, not tenants. The administration offers vegetable deliveries for a fee of 50 RMB (seven euros). “
The residents are now more concerned about reports about people who are taken to quarantine facilities without warning, sometimes in the middle of the night, because individual corona cases have been discovered in their apartment block. According to official information, this affects around 40,000 people. Meanwhile, another city was cordoned off on Tuesday. The more than one million residents of Yuzhou, Henan Province, are said not to leave their homes after three new infections were reported.
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