Shanghainese people clashed with police officers who came to force them to give up their apartments to isolate coronavirus-positive people there, according to several videos released Thursday, April 14, a sign of growing discontent with the inflexible anti-Covid policy.
China’s economic capital is currently facing its worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic. Almost all of the 25 million inhabitants have been confined since the beginning of April, with difficulties in accessing food.
Authorities are isolating people who test positive, even asymptomatic ones, by placing them in quarantine centers. But with more than 20,000 new daily positive cases in recent days, they are struggling to keep up.
“Hit people”
The videos, circulating on Chinese social media, showed residents outside a residential complex, shouting at police with shields, wearing full protective suits and trying to make their way through the crowd. In the footage, police officers appear to arrest several protesters, while residents accuse law enforcement of “hitting people”.
#Shanghai residents scuffled with hazmat-suited police ordering them to surrender their homes to #COVID19 patients,… https://t.co/Uu8x6QaTv2
The footage caused such an outcry that Zhangjiang Group, the residential complex’s property developer, issued a statement about the incident. He affirms that “the situation is now calm” after “Some tenants obstructed the construction” of a quarantine fence. Authorities had ordered 39 households to vacate their apartments “in order to meet the needs of prevention” anti-Covid, the group said.
In a video broadcast live on the social network WeChat and recovered by Agence France-Presse, a crying woman declares:
“The Zhangjiang Group wants to make our residential complex a place of quarantine and place people who are positive for the coronavirus there! »
The promoter claims to have offered compensation to the inhabitants and to have rehoused them in another wing of the same district. Censors deleted much of the online videos of the incident.
Exasperation of the inhabitants
People in Shanghai seem increasingly exasperated by the difficulties of access to food and by the forced isolation of positive people in quarantine centers with uncertain comfort and hygiene. The publication on the Internet of videos of pets being violently euthanized has also caused a scandal.
Demonstrations are much less frequent in China than in the West, but they occur regularly. Little publicized, they find an echo on the Internet, where the speed of dissemination of content often takes censorship by surprise.