Monday, 4 April 2022

Photo: 02669_350s, by Jim Gourley



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/04/photo-02669_350s-by-jim-gourley/
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Children and the Elderly Suffer Under Shanghai’s Lockdown

What Shanghai authorities once hailed as a four day “slowing of the pace” to combat an Omicron outbreak has now become a lockdown in earnest, and children and the elderly are among those suffering the most. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal broke the news of the cover-up of a deadly omicron outbreak in the city’s most populous home for the elderly. Pioneering Chinese outlet Caixin also reported on the outbreak at the home, but its article was censored within hours. Late last week, The Wall Street Journal again broke news of another outbreak in a separate elder-care facility, Shanghai Tongkang Hospital, where at least one patient has died and others remain in quarantine. None of the deaths have yet been reported by Shanghai’s municipal health commission.

As news of elderly deaths was being suppressed, a video of unaccompanied COVID-positive infants and toddlers in quarantine went viral on Douyin and Weibo: 

The children in the videos were reportedly being held at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in Jinshan district. Shanghai officials claimed that the videos were taken while the children were in transit to a pediatric center, but did not deny that dozens of infants are being quarantined separately from their parents. Shanghai’s “rumor busting” WeChat account later posted photos of a better-organized nursery for young COVID patients—albeit with only two adults visible across four photos showing dozens of children. Although some Shanghai officials lamented the separations—Zeng Qun, deputy head of the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, called it a “gut-wrenching problem”—the city is sticking by the policy that separates COVID-positive children from their COVID-negative parents. “​​If the child is younger than seven years old, those children will receive treatment in a public health center,” a municipal health official said in a press conference Monday, adding: “We have made it clear that children whose parents are also positive… can live in the same place as the children.” In online comments archived and translated by CDT, netizens expressed shock and outrage over the treatment of children, and one mother shared her experience of having her daughter taken from her:

@A-佩佩: I have a one-year-old daughter. On March 26, while we were quarantining in a hotel, she was forcibly taken to Jinshan for treatment. At the time, we tried everything including calling 12345 and 110 [a general helpline and the police, respectively], but nothing worked. We were just told to comply with the government’s pandemic protection work. We had to allow a nurse to walk off with our still-feverish daughter in her arms. At the time, we thought our daughter would get better treatment there, but now it seems that everything is different from what they told us. Our child was exhausted after contracting the virus, yet not even her basic safety, food, clothing or hygiene needs were met. As her parents, we wanted to go along with her. Why wouldn’t they let us go? Because going together would be a violation of pandemic prevention work and would have led to our arrest. With deep reluctance, we entrusted our daughter to you, and this is how you treated her. My heart broke while watching that video. I don’t know what my daughter is suffering in there…she’s only a year old! She can’t even walk yet. She’s still drinking baby formula. To the people who designed this policy, I ask—where is your humanity?
@牧童： This isn’t a problem of “lack of foresight,” it’s a problem of “simply not caring.” As long as there is no public outcry, they don’t give a damn. This is the “new normal.”
@Matoda： Those who say this is “impossible” are truly naive. [Chinese]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/04/children-and-the-elderly-suffer-under-shanghais-lockdown/
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Bloomberg – China Censors Shanghai Protest Videos as Lockdown Anger Grows



source https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-01/china-censors-shanghai-protest-videos-as-lockdown-anger-grows?sref=qxQ1voF4#new_tab
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Friday, 1 April 2022

Photo: Shanghai Nostalgia, by Dickson Phua

Taken on a set at Shanghai Film Park, this grainy, black and white image shows a trolley car passing through an old Shanghai commercial neighborhood of days gone by.

Shanghai Nostalgia, by Dickson Phua (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/04/photo-shanghai-nostalgia-by-dickson-phua/
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In Shanghai and Jilin, Chaos, Cover-Ups, and Hunger Under Lockdown

An outbreak of the Omicron strain that began surging through China in early March has hit Shanghai and Jilin Province with particular severity. Shanghai, the cosmopolitan city of 26 million, is under a hybrid form of lockdown known as “universal static management,” an innovation on the “dynamic zero” policy introduced during the lockdown of Xi’an earlier this year. Jilin is entering the second month of lockdown, joining border towns Ruili and Yili, and of course Wuhan, among the cities that have experienced long-term lockdowns. Early reports from Shanghai detail chaos, covered-up deaths, and hunger as the city struggles to adjust to life under lockdown. At The New York Times, John Liu and Paul Mozur reported on Shanghai’s lockdown: 

The measures split the city in half, first closing the eastern section for a five-day quarantine starting Monday, before turning to a similar shutdown in the western portion. Shanghai’s caseload of 3,500 on Monday was tiny compared with much of the world, but it has been driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Officials said the lockdown would enable the authorities to conduct mass testing.

[…One resident] said that during her first lockdown, she couldn’t get groceries online because they sold out quickly. She and her neighbors got together and began buying necessities in bulk. She also wondered whether the panic-buying on Sunday, in which people crammed together inside enclosed stores, could have worsened the spread of the virus.

In other cases, the unpredictability of the restrictions and seemingly indefinite confinement triggered protests. In central Shanghai, around two dozen residents of Jinghua Xinyuan, an apartment complex, crowded in front of a marble and metal security gate that was locked to prevent them from leaving. [Source]

Although the city has yet to report any deaths, The Wall Street Journal’s Wenxin Fan reported on COVID-induced deaths at a Shanghai hospital for the elderly that remain unreported by municipal authorities: 

Six replacement orderlies at the city’s Donghai Elderly Care Hospital, brought in after previous caretakers were sent away to quarantine, told The Wall Street Journal that they had witnessed or heard of the recent removal of several bodies from the facility, where they said at least 100 patients had tested positive for Covid-19.

[…] Roughly four dozen replacement orderlies have been hired by the hospital over the past two days to replace caretakers who had been quarantined, according to people familiar with the situation. Many of the replacement workers weren’t told of conditions in the hospital before being hired and were shocked to be tasked with caring for so many Covid-positive patients, the people said.

One orderly helped remove the bodies of dead patients from the hospital for three days in a row before he himself tested positive and was taken away to quarantine, according to a co-worker. [Source]

The English-language state media outlet Sixth Tone followed up on the Wall Street Journal’s report by conducting in-depth interviews with orderlies who had been misled about the dangers of working at the COVID-plagued hospital:

The recruiters didn’t disclose to Zhang that her job would also entail nursing those infected with the coronavirus. Four other substitute orderlies in the nursing home hired by various recruiting agencies told Sixth Tone that they weren’t informed that some of the residents had been infected with the virus while applying for the job.

Zhang said seven of the eight older residents who lived together in the same ward where she worked with another colleague had tested positive for the virus. They were marked by a yellow triangle-shaped tag. Most of them, she said, were “unable to speak” and in deteriorating health.

[…] Four other orderlies Sixth Tone spoke with also described similar conditions. They said box-like makeshift housing accommodates six to eight substitute orderlies, with at least two people sharing a bed.

“They don’t treat us like humans,” said a 44-year-old orderly who declined to be identified fearing retaliation. [Source]

An unchecked wave of Omicron infections could wreak havoc among China’s 130 million unvaccinated or partially vaccinated over-60 population. The low vaccination rate is partially due to the fact that “the early success of the zero-Covid policy […] created a false sense of security among the elderly,” as Yanzhong Huang told The Financial Times. It is also a result of China’s unique vaccination program, which prioritized ​​vaccinating cold-chain workers, border control officers, and port inspection officers over the elderly. Poor messaging during the initial vaccine rollout is also to blame. When the vaccines were first introduced, they were not made available to China’s over-60 population, which caused many elderly people to mistakenly assume that the vaccines were harmful. “Once you have formed your opinion it’s really difficult to change, it requires ten times more effort,” Oxford epidemiologist Chen Zhengming told The Economist.

As during other lockdowns, there have also been reports of deaths caused not by the virus but rather by triaged medical care necessitated by the all-hands-on-deck response to the outbreak. A nurse at Shanghai East Hospital was denied treatment for an asthma attack because the emergency department was closed for disinfection—a staple of Chinese epidemic prevention work with unclear efficacy—and died while en route to another hospital. Another asthma patient died after ambulance workers denied him treatment. The moment was captured on video and went viral on Weibo. Chinese media reports that the doctor who denied the dying man care has been suspended from his duties. The sudden closure of hospitals providing hemodialysis and cancer treatment has left families scrambling for treatment, many of whom took to Weibo looking for help. Dark humor has followed in death’s wake. A popular online quip goes: “As long as you don’t die of Covid, you can die of any cause.” In Jilin Province, families have faced the same dilemma. Simone McCarthy and CNN’s Beijing bureau reported on patients desperate for care under lockdown in Changchun, Jilin’s provincial capital: 

Chang had been struggling to get her husband, who suffers from a kidney condition, into dialysis for four days — a routine treatment that’s become a seeming impossibility after their city of Changchun was forced into a strict lockdown earlier that month, in response to an outbreak of Covid-19.
[…] “But how can he wait? … He has been afraid to eat and drink for four days … for fear of poisoning his body,” Chang said. “The hospital won’t let us in, and we don’t know where to go …. now do I have to watch him die?”
In another part of the city, Li Chenxi was also in a panic, unable to access care for her mother, who has endometrial cancer. For more than two weeks, her mother had received no treatment after the industrial city of 8.5 million went into lockdown on March 11. Their local hospital wasn’t accepting patients during the outbreak, Li said, and she hadn’t found another opening.
“The only thing we can do is wait. But the tumor won’t wait for us. The tumor is growing every day,” Li said. [Source]

Residents of both Shanghai and Jilin have reported hunger due to the inability to go to the grocery store and strained supply lines, a repeat of the issues experienced much earlier in Xi’an. Many hungry residents who have received neighborhood committee-organized food deliveries in Shanghai have not received meat, inspiring a viral trend whereby people arrange their vegetables in the form of the Chinese character for “meat.” In Changchun, a Party-organized effort to have cadres “show off” their food deliveries across social media platforms to inspire positive thinking backfired after citizens complained about how out-of-touch the campaign was. The food delivery operations depend on China’s non-unionized delivery workers. In Shenzhen, those workers were caught between a rock and a hard place: either work within lockdown zones and earn money without a place to call home, or return to their rented apartments on the outskirts of the city with no inkling of when they might return to work. Despite their pivotal role in fighting the virus, the pandemic has increased discrimination against delivery workers, Hui Huang, a PhD candidate at King’s College, London, told Rest of World: “It’s the nature of food delivery work — drivers need to contact a lot of people, and everyone is afraid of contracting the virus — so drivers are being regarded as virus carriers.”



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/04/in-shanghai-and-jilin-chaos-cover-ups-and-hunger-under-lockdown/
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Verdict Deferred in Australian Journalist Cheng Lei’s Espionage Trial

At 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, the closed-door national security trial of Australian journalist Cheng Lei began amid heavy security at No. 2 People’s Intermediate Court in Beijing. After roughly three hours, the hearing ended without a verdict, which court officials stated would be announced “at a scheduled date.” Cheng has been in detention since August 2020 and is suspected by the Chinese government of “illegally supplying state secrets overseas.” Austin Ramzy from The New York Times described the outrage of Australia’s ambassador to China, who was denied access to the trial and questioned the legitimacy of the legal proceedings:

The Chinese authorities have not released the details of their allegations against the journalist, Cheng Lei, nor have her lawyers or family disclosed any specifics. Australia’s ambassador to China, Graham Fletcher, was not allowed to attend Ms. Cheng’s trial at the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing.

“We can have no confidence in the validity of a process which is conducted in secret,” Mr. Fletcher said after being denied entry.

Court officials cited Chinese restrictions on access to proceedings involving national security, but Mr. Fletcher said Australia’s consular agreement with China should allow diplomats to attend any trial of an Australian national. 

“We have no information about the charges or allegations against Ms. Cheng,” he said. “That is part of the reason why we’re so concerned, because we have no basis on which to understand why she’s been detained.” [Source]

Cheng, 46, was born in Hunan, China, and emigrated to Australia with her parents when she was a child. After working as a business analyst and consultant, she moved back to China to work in the media, first at CNBC Asia in 2003, and then as a business news anchor for Chinese state-media group CGTN in 2012. In August 2020, the Australian government announced it had been notified by Chinese authorities that Cheng had been detained, but provided no further explanation. She was then held held for six months in residential surveillance at a designated location (RSDL), a practice that human rights groups argue amounts to state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture, and that prohibits visits by lawyers or family. In February 2021, she was formally arrested “on suspicion of illegally supplying state secrets to foreign forces.” 

After her detention, posts emerged on Chinese social media vilifying Cheng for being a “spy” and “betraying the motherland.” Evidence of her work with CGTN was systematically scrubbed from the CGTN website and from social media, despite her prominent role in the organization. In her Twitter bio, Cheng had referred to herself as “a passionate orator of the #China story.”

Cheng arrived at the courthouse in full PPE that obscured her demeanor. At a press conference later that day, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin attempted to justify the secret nature of the trial and to deflect foreign criticism:

Pursuant to the Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China, cases involving national secrets shall not be tried in an open court and no one should sit in. Australian citizen Cheng Lei is suspected of illegally providing state secrets to foreign forces. So this is a case involving state secrets. Therefore, holding a closed-door trial by the relevant court is legitimate, lawful, and beyond reproach.

China is a country under rule of law. The Chinese judicial authorities try cases in strict accordance with law and fully protect the litigation rights of relevant individuals. Relevant sides should earnestly respect China’s judicial sovereignty, and refrain from interfering in the law-based handling of the case by Chinese judicial authorities in any form. [Source]

Al Jazeera described Cheng’s strong international support among media groups that also challenged the Chinese government’s justification for her detention:

In a joint statement, Australia’s Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, the International Federation of Journalists, the Australian National Press Club and its United States counterpart said Cheng was being held on “dubious charges that have yet to be substantiated with any evidence”.

“We have urged the Chinese government to show compassion by allowing her to return to Australia and we condemn her arbitrary detention and the secretive trial process she has endured,” the statement said. [Source]

Since her arrest, Cheng has been able to choose her lawyers for the trial, with whom she met as recently as Monday, and to hold monthly virtual visits with Australian consular officers. As reported by the Financial Times, “A person briefed on the visits said Cheng was sometimes brought into the room with a hood over her head and strapped to a chair with a board across her lap.” Ambassador Fletcher stated that, considering the circumstances, she was “doing okay,” and her lawyer stated that she was in good health and good spirits. Cheng also has had access to books donated by friends, including one for learning Spanish, and has been allowed to watch the Beijing Olympics. However, she has been allowed only written contact with her family since her detention almost 20 months ago. “Her two children and elderly parents miss her immensely and sincerely hope to reunite with her as soon as possible,” her family said in a statement.

It is not clear how long Cheng will have to wait until sentencing. In a separate case at the same courthouse in May 2021, Australian spy novelist (and former Chinese diplomat) Yang Hengjun was tried on a similar espionage charge after being held for two years in detention. The Australian ambassador was barred from attending Yang’s trial, and Yang remains in custody to this day, awaiting sentencing. Both Yang and Cheng’s trials recall the detentions of Canadians Michael Spavor and Micheal Kovrig, who were held in China for nearly three years on espionage charges. Spavor had been sentenced to 11 years in prison and Kovrig was awaiting sentencing when they were both freed in exchange for Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou, which many viewed as proof of Beijing’s “hostage diplomacy.” Helen Davidson from The Guardian described the uncertain and potentially perilous future that lies ahead for Cheng:

China’s judicial system has a conviction rate of more than 99%. National security trials are often conducted quickly and in secret, with verdicts and sentences announced unpredictably, sometimes months after trial.

The charge Cheng is facing usually carries a sentence of five-10 years but, depending on how severe the court deems the accusation, she could receive any term – from time served, to life in prison. [Source]

Mike Gow offered an informative Twitter thread explaining the nature of the legal proceedings in Cheng’s case and how that affects the verdict:

Increased tensions between Australia and China may have played a role in Cheng’s detention. In June 2020, weeks before Cheng was detained, Xinhua reported that Australian authorities raided the homes of Australia-based Chinese state-media workers as part of an investigation into foreign interference. Then, in September 2020, two Australian journalists, Bill Birtles and Michael Smith, fled China after state security officers questioned them about Cheng; both denied having any close connection with her. To avoid detention, Birtles took refuge in the Australian embassy in Beijing and Smith hid in the Australian consulate in Shanghai, after which they managed to escape, leaving no accredited Australian journalists left in mainland China. Mere hours after the two journalists safely returned to Australia, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson revealed for the first time that Cheng was being held on national security charges. Other recent incidents have further eroded the Sino-Australian bilateral relationship, including a trade war, the banning of Chinese telecom company Huawei from Australia’s 5G network, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s calls to investigate the origins of COVID-19; and geopolitical jostling over military influence in the Pacific. 

Numerous other journalists have been detained by Chinese authorities on trumped-up national security charges. Haze Fan, a Chinese news assistant for Bloomberg and friend of Cheng Lei, was detained in early December 2021 for allegedly jeopardizing national security. It is not clear whether their arrests are connected, although Fan’s coverage was also business-focused. Prominent journalist and #MeToo activist Huang Xueqin was detained in September 2021, along with her friend and workers’ rights advocate Wang Jianbing, and subsequently charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” Citizen journalist and RSF Press Freedom laureate Zhang Zhan was arrested in December 2020 and sentenced to four years in prison for her reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. As all of these citizens have been subject to RSDL, human rights organizations have renewed calls for China to abolish this inhumane practice. 

 



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/04/verdict-deferred-in-australian-journalist-cheng-leis-espionage-trial/
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Photo: Untitled, by Jakob Montrasio



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/photo-untitled-by-jakob-montrasio/
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