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Caixin, one of China’s leading investigative journalism outlets, published a long story this week in which it accuses officials in Shanghai of hiding Covid-19 deaths.
The Chinese metropolis faces a severe lockdown and has been registering thousands of cases of the disease daily. Citing sources at a nursing home, the report said an 87-year-old man died of the disease in the early hours of March 31.
Following the patient’s body, journalists reported finding ten other corpses in the morgue, all allegedly victims of Covid. The magazine also says it has spoken with family members of at least 12 other dead at two funeral homes in Pudong district.
Officially, China recognizes the deaths of only two infected people in the city this year: an 87-year-old victim and a 65-year-old victim, both reported more than three weeks ago. Local officials declined to comment on the allegations, and the Caixin text was taken offline.
Meanwhile, the lockdown continues to reverberate in Shanghai. With difficulties to buy food and hygiene items, residents begin to show signs of exhaustion.
The initial plan in Shanghai was to split the city into two parts, isolating one for testing while the other would go on with life with less restrictions.
Pudong was the first side to close, and residents had expected a five-day lockdown. At the end of the count, however, the government extended the confinement indefinitely, leaving those who did not stock enough food unprepared.
The situation is expected to remain bad in the coming days, and Shanghai has begun asking neighboring cities to provide isolation facilities to bolster local infrastructure.
why it matters: Closing cities in western or southern China can have economic costs, but the political impact of such a decision in Shanghai is on another level. The city is mostly inhabited by Chinese and foreigners with greater purchasing power who show discontent with the way the government deals with the response to the Covid wave.
what also matters
The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced that she had been diagnosed with Covid, indefinitely postponing her trip to Taiwan on Sunday.
Had he come forward with the idea, the visit would have been the first of its kind by a Speaker of the House since 1997, when Republican Newt Gingrich met with then-island leader Lee Teng-hui.
Beijing even reacted to the news of the trip and threatened to take “strong measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity” if the US insisted on the idea, according to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.
Commenting on the Democrat’s state of health, spokesman Drew Hammill said only that Pelosi is asymptomatic and will follow the isolation guidelines defined by health authorities. He did not respond when (or if) the trip will be rescheduled.
Chinese state media covered the massacre perpetrated by Russian troops in Butcha by assuming the official Kremlin line. The tone was accusing Ukraine of provocation and insinuating that the killings were staged by authorities in the invaded country.
On Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV showed blurred images of bodies scattered across the city. In the caption, the report carried quotes from the Kremlin saying that “the Ukrainians directed a good show”.
The nationalist tabloid Global Times, edited by the also state-run People’s Daily, used the tragedy to reinforce the US guilt narrative in the conflict. In a lengthy editorial, the outlet stated that “it doesn’t matter how the ‘Butcha incident took place”, as “war is the main engine of this humanitarian disaster”.
Officially, China has also avoided blaming Russia. The Foreign Ministry called the event “deeply disturbing” and urged “all parties to exercise restraint and avoid unfounded accusations before an investigation can be conducted.”
keep an eye
After the violent demonstrations in 2019 and, more recently, the inability to contain the transmission of Covid, the leader of the Executive in Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, announced that she will not run for re-election to the position.
Lam cited a desire to spend more time with his family. He thus ends a 32-year career in the city’s public service and paves the way for John Lee, former security secretary and current No. 2 in the local political hierarchy.
why it matters: With the changes in the Basic Law (a kind of Constitution of Hong Kong), the election will be purely ceremonial. Beijing recently made sure that only pro-China deputies held positions in the public administration.
As the vote for local leadership takes place in the Hong Kong Election Committee and later needs to be endorsed by the State Council in Beijing, mainland China will be able to control who gets elected.
to go deep
- This Saturday (9), Observa China welcomes again the sinologist MaurÃcio Santoro to discuss Sino-Brazilian relations. Santoro recently released a book on the subject, published by Palgrave. (free, in Portuguese)
- Mao Zedong has gone down in history as a nationalist leader who promoted the closure of China for decades. The South China Morning Post, however, rescues the story of the only foreign artist who fell into the favor of the Chinese leader: British painter Katharine Jowett. (porous paywall, in English)
​ - Young people have been using the internet to exchange information about the pandemic and plan to shop online during the lockdown in Shanghai. But what about the elderly? In this report, SupChina talks to senior citizens to understand how they are coping with the new wave of restrictions. (porous paywall, in English)
