Thread by @WilliamYang120

By @LiYuan6: “Both the #Xinjiang crackdown and the #Shanghai lockdown are political campaigns that can be explained only through the governing rationale of the ruling Communist Party: Do whatever it takes to achieve the leadership's goal.” nytimes.com/2022/05/06/bus…

“The political slogans in the government’s zero-Covid campaign echo those in the Xinjiang crackdowns. 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.”

“What many Shanghai residents are experiencing doesn’t compare to the violence and cruelty that Uyghurs and Kazakhs have endured in Xinjiang since 2017. But they’re all victims of senseless political campaigns that are driven by paranoia, insecurity and authoritarian excess.”

“Shanghai lockdown is a stress test of social control,” Wang Lixiong, an author of books on Xinjiang, Tibet and surveillance, said in an interview. “If the authority can control a complex society like Shanghai, it can control any place in China.”

“Mr. Wang, who has written nonfiction as well as science fiction, 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.”

Murong Xuecun, author of a new book about the Wuhan lockdown, “Deadly Quiet City,” said he and his friends had talked a few years ago about the risk of the rest of China’s becoming more like Xinjiang. But he didn’t expect it would happen so quickly.

“The pandemic did a huge favor to the Chinese Communist Party, which took the opportunity to expand its power infinitely,” he said in an interview.

In Xinjiang, a repeated order to detain Uyghurs in large number said, “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” In Shanghai, the government demonstrated its determination in sending half a million people to quarantine camps with the slogan, ...

... “Take in all who should be taken in.” In Chinese they’re the same four characters.

In Xinjiang, the “strike hard” campaign sent about one million Muslims to re-education camps for what the government considered problematic behavior, such as giving up alcohol, praying or visiting a foreign country.

In Shanghai, the authorities sent people who tested positive for Covid to makeshift quarantine camps. It didn’t matter that some of the people have recovered from the infection and have tested negative.

Two young professionals documented some of the older people they encountered at their quarantine camps with a podcast, an article and photos on WeChat.

They met one man who was recovering from a stroke and couldn’t use the portable toilets, another who lost his eyesight after his medication ran out and a 95-year-old woman who was so frail that she had to be carried from the bus to the camp.

“There is a real fear that China could become more like Xinjiang or North Korea. Watching Xi Jinping since 2013,” she said of China’s top leader, “I think the Covid control is almost like a milestone toward deepening repression,” said @wang_maya.

“A lawyer in the southern city of Shenzhen told me that he was furious when a surveillance camera was installed in front of his apartment door during a home quarantine and when his building was locked after a neighbor tested positive this year.

There was nothing he could do. He bought a ladder so he could escape next time. Some lawyers and legal scholars voiced their concerns that some pandemic control measures are obvious violation of the law.

“The destruction of the rule of law is a far worse social pandemic than a biological pandemic,” wrote Zhao Hong, a law professor in Beijing.

“No one in the leadership has listened. Nor have they listened to medical experts who have said the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is much milder, though more infectious, than previous versions and that China should recalibrate its zero-Covid policy.”

“It came as a big shock,” said Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College who grew up in Shanghai. “For them the unimaginable happened.” But he thinks that it could be a good political lesson.

“Freedom is a strange thing. You don’t usually realize how precious it is until you have lost it.”

Sun Zhe, the editorial director of a fashion magazine in Shanghai, has been reflecting on his life choices. “I’ll stop all unnecessary shopping. I’ll stop working hard. It was all a lie,” he wrote on his verified Weibo account.

“The affluent, decent middle-class lifestyle that we managed to attain with hard work, intelligence and luck was smashed into pieces in the glorious anti-pandemic campaign.”

“Prosperity is only for decoration,” he continued. “After all, there are luxury shopping malls and hotels in North Korea, too.”