Thread by @WilliamYang120

By @vwang3: "Infected patients quarantined alongside those who tested negative. No food for hours, despite repeated requests. Lines of buses, loaded with people, waiting late into the night to drop them off at makeshift isolation centers." #China #Tibet nytimes.com/2022/09/16/wor…

"But the recent calls for help out of Tibet, as well as Xinjiang — two border regions where the Chinese government has put in place highly repressive controls — speak to how desperate conditions have become there, where many residents are usually intimidated into keeping quiet."

“The social media posts you see from people in Lhasa are all about suffering, but that’s the real Lhasa. Lhasa’s public announcements, I feel they’re all fake,” said a food delivery worker in the city who gave only his surname, Min, for fear of official retaliation.

"The government has promoted positive videos of officials encouraging frontline workers and promising ample supplies of food and medicine.

But Mr. Min said he was quarantined with five family members in an unfinished apartment building, even though he had not tested positive. Workers said he could be released if his latest test, on Sept. 10, also came back negative — but it had been days with no word on a result."

While he was waiting, officials had sent another man to join their family in quarantine, because they were all of the Hui ethnic minority, Mr. Min said."

"The shutdowns gained relatively little attention at first, compared with those in larger cities like Shanghai and Chengdu, whose lockdowns this year dominated Chinese social media.

But in recent days, as the controls have shown no sign of easing, residents have mounted an online campaign to draw attention to their plight."

"On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, some residents have shared videos in Tibetan describing being unable to work or pay rent, according to translations by Tibet Action Institute, an overseas activist group supporting Tibetan independence.

One man, filming himself in a vehicle, said he had been sleeping in his car for a month. A woman begged to be allowed to return to her village elsewhere in Tibet, describing her worry about food running out."

"Lhadon Tethong, the director of Tibet Action Institute, said she had been stunned by what she called a flood of Tibetan voices this week, compared with a trickle of information before.

“They’re these direct cries for help coming from inside in a way that we just don’t see anymore,” she said. “So we know they’re at the breaking point.”

"Several of the videos have been deleted. In the video of the woman asking to go home — no longer available online — she emphasized that she was not protesting.

"On Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, a user whose post about Lhasa’s lockdown was shared more than 6,000 times later posted again thanking users for commenting on government accounts to raise awareness but asked them to stop tagging her."

"Conditions also remain dire for some in Yining, in Xinjiang. The plight of residents there, who have reported shortages of food and female sanitary napkins, also remained largely unknown until a recent storm of social media pleas."

"Halipa, a mother of two in the city who gave only her first name, said officials in recent days had delivered meat and naan — the first time she had eaten meat in three weeks.

"But she was still unable to buy fruit and worried the lack of nutrition had weakened her children’s immune systems. Both contracted fevers this month."