Shanghai concentration camp

Shanghai has become what is essentially the largest concentration camp in history. People are struggling to obtain food, medical supplies, and have even had their babies taken away from them.

This is the brutalist facade of a building just off The Bund in Shanghai. It's reflective of the dark, malicious nature of the Chinese Communist Party, or in this case, resembles a prison wall in a Tolkein epic. // photo my own

Back toward the end of March 2022, Shanghai, the largest city in China at 28.5 million people was locked down. Lockdowns in China are for real. As bad as it was in the United States, it doesn't hold a candle to what is going on in China.

First, they were told there would be no lockdown, despite the dictate handed down from the top, that the goal was to achieve zero COVID, a goal anyone with even a cursory understanding of Coronaviruses would understand. Then they were told that they would lock down for only one week in staggered phases across the city.

Did that sound familiar?

A full month later with lockdowns still in effect indefinitely, things are falling apart, catastrophically. People have been left without food, medical treatment, or basic sanitation.

Screams could be heard echoing throughout the city. Back during the start of the pandemic, video from Wuhan circulated with screams, but that turned out to be screams of encouragement to fellow neighbors. This is not that. These are screams of despair and hunger. If you told me this was filmed during a zombie apocalypse, I just might believe you. The narrator is talking bout how everyone is yelling, how the situation is crazy, how people haven't been able to leave their front door for seven days (early video), and how this cannot go on.

This video, Voices of April, was produced by a Chinese citizen documenting the timeline of events, which quickly went viral on WeChat, but was censored by the Great Firewall shortly after. Then a funny thing happened. People started fighting back against the censors and began reposting the video en masse, starting to utilize techniques used by pirates to fool copyright infringement algorithms to avoid detection by the Chinese censor bots. While the video takes a balanced approach to the events, showing people helping each other while showing the frustration at policy, it cannot be helped but to see the consistent undertone of despair throughout the video. To a libertarian, it is also interesting to note that nearly all of the hopeful messages were of individuals helping each other and nearly all of the despair stemmed from the actions of the state.

The police have taken a brutal stance, essentially stealing residences to turn into quarantine centers, locking people in their own homes, beating people, and even beating someone's corgi to death.

The one thing consistent in the clusterfuck of pandemic responses across the world is that no government can possibly have the knowledge necessary to micromanage their economy like this. All people had to do was to read some Hayek to predict this. Or look at any corporate team larger than five people with a micromanaging boss trying to get one set of TPS reports out, let alone hundreds of millions of people in a complex pandemic with a team of Fauci.

China has a much larger population and an exponentially larger information asymmetry problem than the United States, and a larger thirst and ability for putting its populace under its boot.

In Shanghai, residents were locked in their homes with those testing positive getting dragged off to quarantine centers, places as hospitable as a Cuban hospital. No medication, not enough bathroom facilities, often without heat, and people sleeping on the ground in hallways, are all typical sights and conditions in these quarantine centers. Each resident has been subject to testing at an insane clip of two times a day.

People have not been able to even walk their dogs or go out to buy food. Instead, they have been relying on authorities to bring food and supplies to the residents, supplemented with online bulk ordering, currently an expensive ordeal, if they're even able to secure a shipment. This is a practice that was doomed from the start, as shortages have reigned. Some of the government-distributed food had spoiled and numerous people complained about falling ill after eating the rations. Inexplicably idiotic rules have resulted in shipments of food being left on the street to rot and truck drivers lacking the requisite permits stranded on the highway with a load of perishables baking in the sun. Some authorities appeared to be more interested in taking photos posing to deliver food as opposed to actually delivering them. Never miss a photo-op. This is the political way.

Then came the CCP's potentially fatal error.

They took children away from their parents.

If a child was infected with COVID but the parents are not, the child was taken from the parents and placed in quarantine. China has since eased the policy slightly after a major public backlash, allowing infected parents to accompany their children as well as allowing parents of special needs children to apply to accompany them. I suppose people are supposed to thank the government for kidnapping their children slightly less than before? 

Even still, easing policy due to widespread backlash is a rare occurrence in China.

A few weeks later, trucks began showing up in Shanghai with green metal fences and they began popping up in residential neighborhoods, locking people in their apartment buildings like animals. Aside from the obvious human rights violations, there appears to have been no consideration of what would happen if there was a fire within the building. It's also telling that fences easily make it into the city while transporting food is extremely difficult.

Shanghai has tasted at least some basic freedoms in the past few decades as China had liberated its markets. Though they still lack many freedoms, it will be extremely difficult for the CCP to take away what they do have and get away with it unscathed. Social unrest has been building and there have been several reports of civil disobedience, something thought impossible a mere three years ago. A crowd-sourced list recording the number of deaths caused by lockdowns had started being compiled with 152 entries on the list (some duplicate) by April 18th before the list was blocked by Chinese censors.

It's often easy to just blame everything on the idiocy of the people in charge. But this is inherently how centrally planned authoritarian regimes operate. You have one dictator stating a goal. In this case, it's an impossible-to-achieve goal where the prescription is far worse than the ailment. But Xi Jinping, facing an internal power struggle, needs to take higher risks in an ever more desperate grasp to point at achievements. He is also likely not receiving the proper information from the ground to make any kind of decision that is even remotely close to an achievable goal, due to the probable consequences of reporting bad news to a dictator. On down the hierarchy the dictate goes. Making sure people don't catch a disease with a very high survivability rate is now a higher priority than food, medicine, and sanitation. Because otherwise, the local government heads will roll.

In all of the corporate media articles linked above that mention China's COVID infections, they quote official sources from China, again, as if it has anything to do with reality. Shame. They're not going to mention that the government decided not to report any of the deaths in elderly care homes, or the obvious, that the reported numbers mean the virus kills, post-infection, at radically different rates in China than anywhere else in the world, for some inexplicable reason? For the first month of the Shanghai lockdowns, official numbers claimed zero deaths, an impossible number to achieve. As if the officials suddenly realized how obviously bullshit the numbers are, the death count suddenly jumped in late April, but still wildly divergent below the death rate of any country with even semi-transparent numbers. If that's not enough, the municipal government declared that the "epidemic should appear on the 17th [of April] and that zero-COVID status should be reached on the 20th [of April]," as if the virus works to government-set dates. It becomes clearer when one learns that zero-COVID specifically refers to new cases outside of quarantined areas. So if they quarantine the entire city, by default, zero-COVID! Hey! They solved COVID!

The New York Times also reported on a large number of deaths in the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital where there were large piles of bodies in rooms while officials failed to count the deaths, but in the same article, wrote how China was successful in keeping the virus at bay prior to Omicron. Come on, New York Times. Open your eyes. You cannot possibly be that stupid.

Even the Reuters article talking about how COVID numbers in China are suspect ends with a bizarre hot take from a UCLA professor surmising that the Shanghai government has no reason to report lower death counts after lockdown since a higher number would help lend credence to the lockdown. But what is not taken into account is that the CCP has built its image around its response to the pandemic being the best around the world, which is predicated upon death numbers being low. As such in an authoritarian government, those local governments that report lower numbers to the central government will look better and get to keep their heads about them. Report high numbers, and it very well may invite a house cleaning. I mean, is this professor intentionally obtuse about this or is he really that ignorant? Let's take a look at his bio. Yup. Just as I thought. Grew up in China during that "glorious" Mao era.

Although Shanghai has been at the forefront of attention, these brutal lockdowns are occurring all across China with a combined population of over 190 million people, and reports have those regions less in the public eye suffering even more than Shanghai. Cities like Shanghai are likely making the news due to their connectivity with the outside world and are more resistive because their residents have tasted some limited semblance of freedom. It is much more difficult for governments to revoke basic rights when the people have tasted basic freedoms.

The CCP is having trouble getting itself out of this one, even with the Chinese version of the Disinformation Governance Board working overtime to censor all of the information outside the approved narrative. When the CCP claims the Coronavirus started in some US army base, primarily spread through foreigners, therefore prioritizing vaccinations for dockworkers over the elderly, the Chinese people have few means to discover the realities of the situation. But when you personally know people who have contracted the virus and have died from it, and have had to suffer through the brutality of government lockdowns, that veneer starts to come off pretty quickly. With some luck, this may start to bring the fall of the CCP toward something a little more sane.

Now, it appears to be Beijing's turn in the near future. Here's to hoping high-level CCP members get locked in their own homes. Somehow, I doubt that will happen. Rules for thee, not for me. America is not the only place where this slogan is plastered above the actions of politicians.