The Standard Hong Kong reports on how an optimistic World Health Organization assessment about the Covid pandemic has met the digital buzzsaw of Chinese government censorship:
The World Health Organization chief’s comment that the end of the pandemic is within reach sparked lively online debate — and some censorship — in China, the only major country still trying to stop the spread of the virus.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday that “we have never been in a better position to end the pandemic. We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”
China Newsweek and popular online media outlet Guancha.cn reported on Tedros’s remark and shared videos on social media platform Weibo, but those were removed in the afternoon. A hashtag on Tedros’s comments that gathered some 4.5 million views also appeared to have been removed, and Chinese media disabled the comment function on Weibo posts sharing the news.
Discussions still flowed in the vibrant but closed-off world of China’s internet, with many saying that the shift Tedros spoke of wouldn’t apply to them. China continues to address Covid pretty much as it did at the start of the pandemic in early 2020 — trying to cut off transmission and wipe out the pathogen with intensive restrictions.
Chinese officials have doubled down on their draconian zero-Covid policy in recent weeks. Although Chengdu exited a two-week-long lockdown on Thursday, Radio Free Asia recently reported on a disturbing Covid lockdown in Xinjiang, where the lockdowns seem to be exacerbating the impact of the Chinese Communist Party’s mass atrocities:
More than 600 mostly young Uyghurs from a village in Ghulja were detained by authorities in Xinjiang on Monday after they ignored a strict COVID-19 lockdown and staged a peaceful street protest against a lack of food that has led to starvation and deaths, a local police officer said.
The detention figure was much higher than China’s official number issued the same day on an official police website stating that only two people who violated the lockdown restrictions in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) city were sentenced to five days of detention.
Ghulja, a city of roughly a half-million mainly Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Ili (Yili) Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in the northern part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), has been under lockdown since early August, prompted by outbreaks of COVID-19.