Based in Shanghai since 2014, I can share some details on why it feels so unbearable to be here right now.
Firstly, the totalitarian government have never been good at communicating anything except propaganda. So on one hand we're inundated with "Go Shanghai!" and how brave volunteers distribute food, on the other hand, we're completely in the dark about what's going on. Goalposts are being moved daily, rumors proliferate, and things change every day, adding a lot of stress to an already suboptimal situation.
Second, I can confirm that the food situation is extremely bad. We are a family of two, and always been kind of preppers, so we had many bags of rice, pasta, dehydrated veg, frozen meats in our large fridge. Chinese society, en masse, is much more used to just ordering food daily. Many people never cook. It's cheaper this way (though of course the quality varies). Bigger families with aunties who can cook just used to pop by the local wet market daily and get a bag of fresh produce. Many households might not even have a fridge at all, or have a small one.
The government was saying that "there will be no lockdown", and when the lockdown became imminent, people barely had two days to stock up. Queues, fights, empty shelves everywhere. More stress.
A lot of people in our community do not have any food left, and we've received two government issued "rations" so far (in 12 days of lockdown): one with 5 tomatoes, and one with 3 pounds of chicken drumsticks, 3 potatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, and a bunch of rotten lettuce. If we did not stock up, we would be starving right now. We donated quite a bit of food to our neighbors already, and many people are actually very close to having no food at all. Getting a delivery is almost impossible, group orders organized by compounds are often ridiculously overpriced, and not always work out. Scams are emerging.
Thirdly, I understand the author's frustration with the guards ("baoan"). Those people never had any formal power, but now they "run things" and, for many, the newly obtained power went to their heads. Violence and abuse is abound. We have PCR tests every 1-2 days, sometimes at 6am, some compounds at 3am. People dragged from their beds and forced to stand in queues.
How would you respond to all that?
Yes, it has some potential to save lives, but if it was communicated better, if we had more time to prepare, and they could still run food deliveries, nobody would complain that much. It's terribly mismanaged, and even after we "open up", I will strongly reconsider staying here. Omicron will return, and I do not want to be here for the next (and next, and next) lockdown.
It’s fascinating to me how tolerant some people are. After reading your comment (very informative thanks!), I would be well past “considering”. I’d be gone (with family in toe) as soon as humanly possible.
There are other factors at play. For one, I have a Chinese wife who has elderly parents (not in Shanghai), for now they fare well, but we might need to look after them sooner or later. Another factor is that I have a few years contract in a startup I care much about, sure we could do remote, but this would be a blow to them. I will try to solve these and see if we can move to Taiwan or somewhere else relatively close by.
People don't want to die. They'll find a way break out of their houses before starving to death and they'll look for food. It's hard to defend against that at the scale of a city the size of Shanghai. If the government is smart they'll let people out in a controlled way but if I were in Shanghai I won't bet my life on that. Of course it's a matter of timing. If you get out to early you'll be nearly alone and you could fail or worse. If you a too much misplaced trust you die at home.
Issue is, bribe them for what? They don't really have any means to get food either and if they were to look the other way while you slipped out of the community you'd find every shop closed.
They don't take monetary bribes, but favours, cigarettes etc
As a Chinese, I can say that the situation is worse than it in the article. My brother is a student who lives in a flat and has not eaten for two days and no one has brought basic substances. He can't leave the flat, he turns to his tutor but his tutor is also forced to stay at home (eating instant noodles every day). We are worried about him but there is nothing we can do, if we criticise the government on chinese Twitter we will be arrested by the police. ಥ_ಥ
me and my wife (we live in Suzhou) actually talked that if this happens to our city, it might actually become worth to "cause trouble" and get arrested, hoping that there would be some food given in the police station.
Its ridiculous how dystopian such conversations have become recently...
Yes, and anyone without a Shanghai hukou (identity card) is not even allowed to get government food. That is a LOT of people in the Shanghai region. I wish the best for everyone stuck there.
- have no "buffer", meaning living in houses where you can't store food in quantity sufficient for a certain, not little, period of time, in some countries there are even official recommendations like Swiss who recommend one week of food and three days of water (I think, not sure about exact data);
- live in a not-united population that can arise effectively, no government, no power can stop an angry population, they can only try to avoid communications, create confusion and divert anger towards against false/others target.
The first issue might be sorted out if economical conditions allow citizens to live in large-enough homes with room for freezers etc to guarantee even a month of autonomy. The second unfortunately is a tricky business that can change in decades, no less...
> no government, no power can stop an angry population
There are plenty of examples of the government doing just that in China. Boxer, taiping, 8 trigrams rebellions, etc, and those are just a few recent historical examples.
In a country as large as China, you need substantial support from sympathetic government insiders if the angry population is even remotely regionally located. Uniting a billion people is an extremely high bar if that is your goal.
The longer you wait, the hungrier you get. The hungrier you get, the weaker you are. Best for the people of Shanghai if they start rioting now than a week from now, when it may be too late.
The only hope for your brother is if there's a black market for food staples and basic commodities taken shape in Shanghai already and there's an informal network of couriers to deliver food behind all the barriers
No they shut down all deliveries of food and food stuff like a week before the lockdown. You could still get some during that time, but I have many orders that never shipped. After lockdown started, all deliveries stopped.
> People are finding out that state media exists not for accurate news, but only to spin reality into a narrative that fits the powers higher up.
Are people really finding that out only now? I thought that this was generally accepted knowledge even in China, despite the constant fear and propaganda they live with.
What's happening now with the strict lockdowns and zero-Covid policy is inhumane. People are literally prisoners in their own homes and anyone in a position of power will abuse it to avoid hurting their social score. What a fucked up situation.
> Are people really finding that out only now? I thought that this was generally accepted knowledge even in China, despite the constant fear and propaganda they live with.
Yes and no. You see, 2 decades ago probably half of my peers had that knowledge, that was when the internet was pretty much uncensored compared to how it is today. Over the years they get converted by the narrative and now it's probably 5% or even less that keeps a critical mind when reading anything from anywhere, which is, your know, all censored.
It takes constant vigilance and a high degree of discernment to see through such a narrative. They know its hard to keep up over long term. That's why the maintenance of alternative news sources is so important before it gets that bad.
This is interesting to hear, because distrust got so deeply embedded in Hungarians in the previous and the current system, that at this point, barely anyone believe anything, and the ones that do follow after the conspiracy lunatics.
I just a couple of days had a conversation with a Chinese friend about this (he is living in Sweden). Essentially he said that previously he thought free-media/free-speech was something he understood, but did not consider terribly important for his own live (i.e. you still live a good live, the Chinese government was lifting the population out of poverty ...), but seeing the media and how they dealt with suppressing covid news (especially news how people with other conditions who did not get treated, that just disappeared from social media) he realised that this could easily affect him as well.
So in summary it was not about that he didn't know that state media was manipulating the news, but more that the crisis showed how this could affect anyone.
A high school friend of ours is apartment-jailed in Shanghai right now. She is a young mom, and all the moms in the apartment are all out of everything required to care for babies. Trying to share strategies on how to use any kitchen ingredients to make formula or rash ointments…
I wonder if this will actually have any political blowback in the coming years, or if this only strengthens the ccp.
That's terrifying :( and incredibly sad for anyone who ends up in that position and China as a people.
Can someone explain the downvotes? This is HN not the CCP, we demand action to be backed up with reason. The article suggested "political prisoners" to be included in those ending being killed by organ harvesting, so it seems relevant to the parent's comment:
> Robertson claims surgeons operated on death-row prisoners and “prisoners of conscience”, which could include political prisoners
[edit]
Votes seem to have changed. That's not helped my fear of being monitored :/
There have been stories and rumors about this for decades. It definitely happens with prisoners that are on "death row". I guess if you're a high level CCP member and need a heart that's just what's gonna happen. You don't really have any rights there just whatever "freedoms" the government allows. I try to warn people who think Trump should be dictator that it's not a good idea.
You don't need baby formula, it's sad how MANY Chinese fall for baby formula propaganda banned in west with formula samples given to new mothers in Chinese hospitals. Only 1-5% of mothers are unable to breastfeed, the most of the formula buyers just believe fairy tales and feed their kids unhealthy formula and then they complain about being unable to get formula.
Also you dont really need much for baby besides breastmilk, you can make fabric diapers as in old times (yes, it's inconvenient, we went easier way) and that's about it, since baby just need breastmilk, clean clothes and diaper, when older you are fine with boiled smashed vegetables, so these complaints really feel but completely clueless (lazy) mother and only justified complaint is rash ointments which can be really issue and ain't that easy to deal with at home.
It seems difficult to argue that mothers should totally change what they’re doing (away from the thing they had believed was right) and to achieve this they would likely need to be convinced that the new way is better. But I think this is also missing the point because if people are struggling to get food too they likely won’t produce much milk.
Yeah if you completely shut down private services there, then there's no way the government has the resources to help everyone. They'll end up killing and traumatizing far more people than they're saving from covid. Rather than forcing everyone to get a vaccine they do this--I mean if you're going to be a totalitarian system at least do it logically. Just goes to show you how shit the CCP logic is.
It gives more weight to Americans who opposed lockdowns too. This is the slippery slope argument coming to life, if you took lockdown to the extreme, and I think that was the biggest fear of those who opposed lockdowns.
I think most everyone _is_ vaccinated. That is what makes this sadder.
Can we use some of this outrage energy that the world has summoned in this decade to hold governments like CCP to account? Or are they still untouchable because everyone still thinks that the CCP-managed economy is unstoppable and we need to reserve our place in line for the future scraps from that table?
I have been to Shanghai multiple times and have great friends suffering there. Being anti-CCP is neither racist nor anti-China. I dream of the day when all of China is as vibrant and powerful as Taiwan is today, or Hong Kong before Carrie Lam.
> The article provides no direct evidence of people starving, only that 'We cannot freely choose our recipes'.
What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.
From the article:
> Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.
What is wrong with people like you? Seriously. There is bunch of content online that shows the severity of the situation in China. Here is one: https://twitter.com/cam_l/status/1512646118575812612
Regarding the fish, I think you have conveniently missed the most important part: "Three fresh fish, a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps, although you need to check it all day and be extremely lucky you can grab something for the split second it’s available.".
Yes the author cannot freely choose their recipes and was able to buy three fish:
> a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps
But they're able to work from home, likely wealthy and well resourced. They also mention this:
> we’re lucky — many people (because of the nature of their job) cannot and see their bank account go to zero, or their own business go bankrupt
If you can't work, earn money and (therefore) can't scour delivery apps for food you're going to starve (note also: they said they've had one small state-provided package of food for nine days)
One assumes he acquired the fish with the exchange of money, however some occupations actually still require your physical presence outside your bedroom. Do you see the catch-22?
Given the photo of food rations (unlikely to support an adult for a day) the implication is there is no financial support for Shanghai residents, but the author doesn't say.
Use logic. Do you actually believe the communist party in China has the resources to lock up 25 million people in their apartments and provide food and services for all of them over night? Of course people are starving.
I appreciate your insistence on evidence of starvation. Death from starvation generally requires 30 - 70 days without food, depending on starting weight, body fat, activity levels, etc. Shanghai has been under lockdown for 12 days. It is unlikely you will find any real evidence of starvation.
More interesting to me are the claims that food is scarce, grocery orders are unreliable, the government has not provided sufficient rations. Most importantly, the claim that the government insisted there would be no lockdown and arrested folks for disinformation when they predicted it, thus leaving the population unprepared.
Do you have any evidence that the government prepared the populace for this event? Do you have evidence they are supply sufficient rations?
I posted a Tell HN about lockdowns coming before they were announced, about two or three weeks ago.
I'm currently in lockdown, not sure when we're getting out. And then after that someone in the compound will probably be infected pretty soon and it all starts over.
I don't see how anyone could miss it given what happened around the world with omicron. One slip and you have about 90% of the people in a room catch it, and then those people go other places.
I lived in an urban village in China during the 2020 lockdowns and literally overnight the authorities erected 6+ foot high fences around my whole neighborhood. Entry and exit to the newly-minted gated community was funneled through two checkpoints that never existed prior to COVID. Authorities were actively patrolling the streets checking ID and ensuring nobody jumped the fence. If an authoritarian government wants to restrict the movements of their population badly enough, they will find a way.
I’ve seen pictures of those barriers. I’ve wondered how China was able to source those materials so quickly.
I know China is amazing a manufacturing anything at scale but I can only imagine having the wide deployment of something like chain linked fencing available instead of large barriers.
It'd be almost impossible to police, although you could in theory do it. An apartment building can have its main doors locked and bolted and guarded by a few police and that might trap hundreds of people.
Readit News
Firstly, the totalitarian government have never been good at communicating anything except propaganda. So on one hand we're inundated with "Go Shanghai!" and how brave volunteers distribute food, on the other hand, we're completely in the dark about what's going on. Goalposts are being moved daily, rumors proliferate, and things change every day, adding a lot of stress to an already suboptimal situation.
Second, I can confirm that the food situation is extremely bad. We are a family of two, and always been kind of preppers, so we had many bags of rice, pasta, dehydrated veg, frozen meats in our large fridge. Chinese society, en masse, is much more used to just ordering food daily. Many people never cook. It's cheaper this way (though of course the quality varies). Bigger families with aunties who can cook just used to pop by the local wet market daily and get a bag of fresh produce. Many households might not even have a fridge at all, or have a small one.
The government was saying that "there will be no lockdown", and when the lockdown became imminent, people barely had two days to stock up. Queues, fights, empty shelves everywhere. More stress.
A lot of people in our community do not have any food left, and we've received two government issued "rations" so far (in 12 days of lockdown): one with 5 tomatoes, and one with 3 pounds of chicken drumsticks, 3 potatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, and a bunch of rotten lettuce. If we did not stock up, we would be starving right now. We donated quite a bit of food to our neighbors already, and many people are actually very close to having no food at all. Getting a delivery is almost impossible, group orders organized by compounds are often ridiculously overpriced, and not always work out. Scams are emerging.
Thirdly, I understand the author's frustration with the guards ("baoan"). Those people never had any formal power, but now they "run things" and, for many, the newly obtained power went to their heads. Violence and abuse is abound. We have PCR tests every 1-2 days, sometimes at 6am, some compounds at 3am. People dragged from their beds and forced to stand in queues.
How would you respond to all that?
Yes, it has some potential to save lives, but if it was communicated better, if we had more time to prepare, and they could still run food deliveries, nobody would complain that much. It's terribly mismanaged, and even after we "open up", I will strongly reconsider staying here. Omicron will return, and I do not want to be here for the next (and next, and next) lockdown.
It’s fascinating to me how tolerant some people are. After reading your comment (very informative thanks!), I would be well past “considering”. I’d be gone (with family in toe) as soon as humanly possible.
From what everybody is saying, it has the potential to take many lives too.
They don't take monetary bribes, but favours, cigarettes etc
Noncompliance at minimum, riots, more probably. There is a point of hunger when one loses it.
Dead Comment
- have no "buffer", meaning living in houses where you can't store food in quantity sufficient for a certain, not little, period of time, in some countries there are even official recommendations like Swiss who recommend one week of food and three days of water (I think, not sure about exact data);
- live in a not-united population that can arise effectively, no government, no power can stop an angry population, they can only try to avoid communications, create confusion and divert anger towards against false/others target.
The first issue might be sorted out if economical conditions allow citizens to live in large-enough homes with room for freezers etc to guarantee even a month of autonomy. The second unfortunately is a tricky business that can change in decades, no less...
There are plenty of examples of the government doing just that in China. Boxer, taiping, 8 trigrams rebellions, etc, and those are just a few recent historical examples.
In a country as large as China, you need substantial support from sympathetic government insiders if the angry population is even remotely regionally located. Uniting a billion people is an extremely high bar if that is your goal.
The longer you wait, the hungrier you get. The hungrier you get, the weaker you are. Best for the people of Shanghai if they start rioting now than a week from now, when it may be too late.
I hope your brother finds a way through this situation.
Dead Comment
Are people really finding that out only now? I thought that this was generally accepted knowledge even in China, despite the constant fear and propaganda they live with.
What's happening now with the strict lockdowns and zero-Covid policy is inhumane. People are literally prisoners in their own homes and anyone in a position of power will abuse it to avoid hurting their social score. What a fucked up situation.
Yes and no. You see, 2 decades ago probably half of my peers had that knowledge, that was when the internet was pretty much uncensored compared to how it is today. Over the years they get converted by the narrative and now it's probably 5% or even less that keeps a critical mind when reading anything from anywhere, which is, your know, all censored.
So in summary it was not about that he didn't know that state media was manipulating the news, but more that the crisis showed how this could affect anyone.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
I wonder if this will actually have any political blowback in the coming years, or if this only strengthens the ccp.
That's how they did it in the past, when a mother wasn't producing enough milk. It was an actual job called wet nurse [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse
China makes use of people who complain to much
https://nypost.com/2022/04/07/researchers-claim-chinese-surg...
Can someone explain the downvotes? This is HN not the CCP, we demand action to be backed up with reason. The article suggested "political prisoners" to be included in those ending being killed by organ harvesting, so it seems relevant to the parent's comment:
> Robertson claims surgeons operated on death-row prisoners and “prisoners of conscience”, which could include political prisoners
[edit]
Votes seem to have changed. That's not helped my fear of being monitored :/
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Also you dont really need much for baby besides breastmilk, you can make fabric diapers as in old times (yes, it's inconvenient, we went easier way) and that's about it, since baby just need breastmilk, clean clothes and diaper, when older you are fine with boiled smashed vegetables, so these complaints really feel but completely clueless (lazy) mother and only justified complaint is rash ointments which can be really issue and ain't that easy to deal with at home.
If you'd ever shared your home with a baby that had nappy rash I feel you might have a different pov here.
Ouch. Seems like a really bad situation.
Can we use some of this outrage energy that the world has summoned in this decade to hold governments like CCP to account? Or are they still untouchable because everyone still thinks that the CCP-managed economy is unstoppable and we need to reserve our place in line for the future scraps from that table?
I have been to Shanghai multiple times and have great friends suffering there. Being anti-CCP is neither racist nor anti-China. I dream of the day when all of China is as vibrant and powerful as Taiwan is today, or Hong Kong before Carrie Lam.
What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.
From the article:
> Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.
> a good ‘catch’ for what we can still buy on delivery apps
But they're able to work from home, likely wealthy and well resourced. They also mention this:
> we’re lucky — many people (because of the nature of their job) cannot and see their bank account go to zero, or their own business go bankrupt
If you can't work, earn money and (therefore) can't scour delivery apps for food you're going to starve (note also: they said they've had one small state-provided package of food for nine days)
Given the photo of food rations (unlikely to support an adult for a day) the implication is there is no financial support for Shanghai residents, but the author doesn't say.
More interesting to me are the claims that food is scarce, grocery orders are unreliable, the government has not provided sufficient rations. Most importantly, the claim that the government insisted there would be no lockdown and arrested folks for disinformation when they predicted it, thus leaving the population unprepared.
Do you have any evidence that the government prepared the populace for this event? Do you have evidence they are supply sufficient rations?
Dead Comment
I'm currently in lockdown, not sure when we're getting out. And then after that someone in the compound will probably be infected pretty soon and it all starts over.
Feel free to AMA.
https://nitter.net/RealSexyCyborg/status/1512734595485106179
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1512734595485106179.html
I know China is amazing a manufacturing anything at scale but I can only imagine having the wide deployment of something like chain linked fencing available instead of large barriers.
Did they have a stock of them ready?
https://www.ifpri.org/blog/lockdowns-are-protecting-chinas-r...
You may not be locked inside your house but you can still be locked in your village, which may not have food either.