As Tianhe district in #Guangzhou faces sharply rising number of cases in recent days and as a sudden lockdown looms, large number of students have reportedly been sent home by schools and on Weibo, there are many posts about the train station packed with stranded passengers.
One netizen wrote about how he hasn’t slept for an entire night, has been waiting for the PCR result for 16 hours without a success, can’t get on his train to leave so he has to cancel his ticket and he is still waiting for his pcr test result at the bus stop.
“I’m cold, stranded, tired and hungry yet I have to prevent things from being stolen. I’m feeling terrible,” he wrote.
“I got an emergency notification at 1 am, sat in the corridor crying and trembling at 2, saw students flee with their luggage at 3 am, sat on my own luggage and cried alone, waiting to go home at 4 am, and I finally got on the train at 5 am to leave this place that “eats people.”
I woke up at 3 am. Since hearing about the news last night, I haven’t been able to sleep well. The school only informed us about ending early on Tuesday and we need to leave school before December 4. I am confused. I didn’t get train tickets beforehand, the prices for ...
... arranging a car to drive me home will be priced on the spot, school doesn’t let us keep staying and even if they let me stay and eat, what can I do? I’m so tired.
It’s like mass-fleeing since midnight and when I woke up, it’s empty around me. I couldn’t believe what I saw in pictures of the situation at the train stations now from friends. It’s already 2022 and I can’t run.
The emotions, anxiety and frustration expressed in these posts help to offer a good sense of the helplessness that many people in #China feel right now. It also helps to explain why people are willing to take risks and protest against the zero covid policy publicly.
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Big scoop from @lizalinwsj: "#China’s internet watchdog instructed tech companies to expand censorship of protests and moved to curb access to virtual private networks this week." wsj.com/articles/china…
"The Cyberspace Administration of China issued guidance to companies on Tuesday, including Tencent Holdings Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese owner of short video apps TikTok and Douyin, ...
... asking them to add more staff to internet censorship teams, according to people familiar with the matter."
My latest for @dw_hotspotasia: Authorities in cities across #China are using sophisticated surveillance methods to dampen anti-lockdown demonstrations, according to lawyers and protesters. dw.com/en/china-fight…
Several sources told DW that police in large cities like Shanghai have been randomly checking people's phones on the street or on subways. Police have demanded people provide personal information and immediately remove apps like Telegram, Twitter, or Instagram.
Others have said they were called by police and had their phones searched by authorities.
"Police warned me not to use Telegram and asked me to stop sharing information about the pandemic through the software," says one protester surnamed Lin.
From @WSJ: "Twitter is banned in #China, but it is proving a critical platform for getting videos and images of protests occurring across the nation out to the rest of the world." wsj.com/articles/twitt…
One Twitter user who lives outside China and goes by the name of Li Laoshi, @whyyoutouzhele said he has been receiving more than a dozen messages per second with protest material at some points since public unrest erupted—the same number he used to get a day—...
... so that he could repost them publicly. “My daily routine is: wake up, post online, and feed my cat,” he said.
Voices from #China by @guardiannews: “In China, it’s near impossible [to be unified] because social divides are too great. People want different things. [However], they all want accountability.” theguardian.com/world/2022/nov…
“I think we are not suffering the most so there have not been large protests. Here the lockdowns have been shorter and inflation is lower. [The situation] is unimaginable in some other parts of China.”
“I think the zero-Covid policy cannot go on no matter how heavily [the government] tread upon us. It’s bound to fail sooner or later. The economy is crumbling. People want to live. I think [these protests] may fizzle out but then there will be something else.”
“With that recent experience fresh in mind, NATO foreign ministers at a meeting in Bucharest have engaged in their most concerted effort yet to grapple with the #China challenge, despite their preoccupation with the war in #Ukraine.” nytimes.com/2022/11/30/wor…
@SecBlinken said Wednesday that NATO had agreed to take further concrete steps to address the growing strategic challenge from China, including trying to coordinate export controls on technology and security reviews of Chinese investments.
The secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, said that the discussions had a special focus on how to reduce “our dependencies on other authoritarian regimes, not least China, for our supply chains, technology or infrastructure.”
“US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that #China's "repressive" crackdown on protests over Covid lockdowns showed "weakness" by the communist leadership.” ndtv.com/india-news/ant…
"In any country where we see that happening and then we see the government take massive repressive action to stop it, that's not a sign of strength, that's a sign of weakness," said Blinken, who was in Romania for NATO meetings.
Blinken said that China's zero-Covid policy, the initial trigger for the protests, was "not something that we would do," adding the United States has focused instead on vaccines, testing and treatment.