Shanghai residents ‘beaten’ while begging police not to seize their apartments
Shanghai residents ‘beaten’ while begging police not to seize their apartments
By Simina Mistreanu
Residents fought with police in Shanghai, China, when officials tried to seize their homes to make space for new COVID quarantine centres, in the latest sign of widespread discontent after three weeks of strict lockdown in the megacity.
Videos on social media showed people shouting at police holding shields and arrests being made. Screaming and crying can be heard in the background.
In one clip, residents are kneeling in front of hazmat-suit-wearing officials, pleading to not have their apartments transformed into quarantine centres.
“They want to put 1800 [COVID] positive patients into our community, where all the residents have tested negative,” one man said. “They beat our residents, our elderly and our women. They don’t even care if we kneel and beg.”
In another video, a woman is heard weeping and asking “Why are they taking an old person away?” as officials appeared to put someone into a car.
In another a woman in lockdown argues for hours with police to allow her to take her sick two-year-old to hospital.
The financial hub is in its third week of lockdown and is recording more than 20,000 COVID infections daily, most are asymptomatic.
Everyone who tests positive must go to a quarantine centre. The city has built more than 100 makeshift hospitals with at least 160,000 beds and has converted schools and exhibition halls into quarantine centres, but space in these facilities has run out.
The clashes on Thursday were sparked after authorities ordered 39 families to move out of their homes so the government could house new cases in the complex.
Officials said it had compensated the tenants and moved them into other units in the same compound. “The situation had now settled down [after] some tenants obstructed the construction” of a quarantine fence, they added.
Search results for the name of the apartment complex disappeared from Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, but the footage could still be found online elsewhere on Saturday.
Chinese social media is heavily censored but officials appear to be having a hard time keeping up with the number of posts about the lockdown. Other clips online depict elderly people being left without carers, residents in need of medicine, fights over food supplies, and dire living conditions in government-run quarantine centres.
Senior officials have publicly criticised the strategy, including Li Keqiang, the country’s premier, who has warned of the risks to economic growth but Beijing keeps pursuing a zero-COVID policy.
President Xi Jinping said the country would continue regardless. “Persistence is victory,” he added.
The Shanghai outbreak, combined with virus clusters in other regions of China, constitutes the country’s largest COVID crisis since it first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019. State media confirmed an official from the Shanghai health bureau killed himself on Wednesday because of the pressure of handling the outbreak.
The city has been under lockdown for nearly a month, although it started easing some restrictions this week by allowing residents in some areas to leave their homes.
Neighbourhoods have been divided into three risk categories, with people in residential areas that have had no positive cases over a two-week stretch being allowed to leave their homes.
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