Category: Middle East

As Shanghai residents celebrated a partial end to a weeks-long, grueling city-wide lockdown, calls emerged on Wednesday for industrial action by businesses in the city to protest Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy. As the Shanghai city government claimed the city’s lockdown had lifted despite multiple barriers to movement around the city, an open letter calling on workers and companies to “lie down on the job” and to go back to work, but not back to production began circulating online. The May letter, penned by businesses rather than shop-floor workers, predicts mass capital flight and a widespread loss of public confidence in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi, and calls on the industrial sector not to act like “sheep fattened for slaughter.” “It is a pity that some of us entrepreneurs and investors who are slightly successful, despite sitting on investments of hundreds of billions of yuan in Shanghai and across the whole country, and employing millions of employees, are still struggling,” the letter said. “Repeatedly forced into isolation, door-to-door disinfecting and other threats at the hands of neighborhood committees, the police, and unidentified individuals, all that expensive real estate wasn’t enough to protect us or our families,” it said. “Now we have woken up, we are no longer willing to wait like fat lambs for the slaughter,” it said. “In honor of the 20th CCP National Congress [later this year], we will be going back to work, but not back to production.” Predicting mass capital flight a large-scale corporate bankruptcy, reorganization, and liquidation, the letter said the “rule of law” had been reduced to “rule by man”, while the economy had been hijacked by politics, leaving millions of COVID-19 “graduates” unemployed. “Social unrest is inevitable,” it warned, adding that mass layoffs, salary cuts and streamlining would be necessary. “We have a full sense of autonomy and aspire to fair competition,” the letter said. “We look forward to a civil society. The people should take back their civil rights and rebuild the country.” It called on the government to overturn the guilty verdicts against entrepreneurs Ren Zhiqiang and Sun Dawu, as well as punishing officials responsible for “violating the law and disregarding public opinion” as part of the zero-COVID policy. A health worker takes a swab sample from a woman in the Huangpu district of Shanghai on June 1, 2022. Credit: AFP Entrepreneurs speak out It called for the “release and rehabilitation” of political prisoners, calling them “national treasures, and the backbone of the nation.” “Returning power to the people, rewriting the constitution, loosening the CCP’s control of the media, eliminating the privileged class, abolishing feudal systems like household registration and political review, and all other unreasonable systems that violate human morality and conscience,” the letter said. “If the country does not reform, trust in the government cannot be rebuilt, and the free market cannot be hoped for, we will never have peace!” it said, calling for the protection of private property rights, especially freehold residential homes, the “last refuge of the family.” RFA made contact with several of the people who authored the letter, via other contacts, and was able to verify its authenticity. French political commentator Wang Longmeng said the authors had asked him to help publicize the letter overseas. “I can guarantee that this is the true voice of some entrepreneurs in Shanghai,” Wang told RFA. “Instead of committing suicide like Nanjing entrepreneur Hou Guoxin, they fought back.” “Even the strategy of resuming work without resuming production shows courage,” he said. “The open letter makes the crucial point that there can be no real economic vitality without political reform.” France-based Wan Runnan, the dissident software engineer who founded Stone Emerging Industries Company in the 1980s, said Xi’s zero-COVID policy has led to the loss of China’s economic vitality, the loss of public support, and had likely also undermined the legitimacy of the CCP regime. “Xi Jinping is so stupid and utterly barbaric,” Wan told RFA. “What is zero-COVID? … It has brought zero economic growth, and zero hearts and minds.” “He has lost the support of the party, the people and the army,” he said. “Entrepreneurs are also a social force and a key component of public support.” An open letter penned by Shanghai entrepeneurs calling on workers and companies to “lie down on the job” predicting mass capital flight and a widespread loss of public confidence in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping. Credit: Wang Longmeng Bound to a sinking ship Wan said China’s entrepreneurs know very well that if the 20th Party Congress does not initiate a process of political reform, they will eventually be bound to the sinking ship of the Chinese economy. “Their plan is a very good one, which is to say that what happens to the economy depends on what happens at the 20th Party Congress,” he said. “If Xi doesn’t step down … then we are sorry but we won’t play ball.” Residents of Shanghai celebrated on the streets after the lifting of lockdown at midnight on June 1, honking vehicle horns and cheering. Many of them have been trapped in their homes for more than two months. Negative PCR tests continue to be required for entry and exiting residential estates and other public places, with hundreds of testing stations set up in the streets to facilitate compulsory mass testing. A resident of Jing’an district surnamed He said she got up in the middle of the night to do her PCR test, to ensure the results were back by the time she needed to go grocery shopping. “It takes between 48 hours and 72 hours to issue a PCR test certificate,” she said. “They ask to see these certificates if you go shopping at the supermarket.” “It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head; you need it to take the bus or get on the subway,” He said. A Yangpu resident surnamed Chen said lockdown hadn’t even eased yet in her district. “We’ve been issued with residents’ cards,…

The weeks-long COVID-19 lockdown in China has taken a huge mental health toll, with more than 40 percent of the city’s 26 million residents reporting symptoms of depression in a recent poll. Shanghai residents have been battling food shortages, barriers to medical treatment, repeated mass, compulsory PCR and antigen testing, as well as the constant threat of being sent off to an isolation camp or makeshift hospital, having their pets killed and their homes ransacked by “disinfection” teams, or being welded inside their homes by local officials keen to hit the right quotas in the service of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy. A poll of more than 1,000 Shanghai residents conducted by the @Zhaoluming Weibo account found that more than 400 of them reported having experienced a “depressed mood” during lockdown. A resident of downtown Shanghai surnamed Wang said he believes the true number of depressed people could be much higher. “Forty percent? I would say more like 80 percent,” Wang said. “Everyone has a sense of resentment and their psychology isn’t quite normal, whole communities shut up like animals in a zoo.” Photo illustration by RFA; Reuters Qiu Jianzhen, director of the outpatient department of psychological counseling and treatment at the Shanghai Mental Health Center, said in a recent interview with state broadcaster CCTV that the number of calls to the center’s psychological hotline had nearly tripled in the past month to more than 3,000. Eighty percent of callers cited the pandemic as an issue for their mental health, Qiu said. “If you need to see a doctor or call an ambulance, the neighborhood committee needs to sign off with a certificate and a letter of commitment,” Wang told RFA. “There is a lot of anger about that, because what if it’s urgent?” “Most of the people who live in my compound are temporary workers, so if they can’t work, they get no wages,” he said. “Even if they lift the lockdown, who will compensate us for the loss of more than a month’s income?” “How can the small company bosses do that … when they are going bankrupt themselves?” Visible toll Wang lives in a low-income district of Puxi with his family, and was mostly worried about how to feed his kids when lockdown came. Photo illustration by RFA; Reuters “Adults can maybe get by on frozen food, but I was worried about the kids not having any milk or any fruit,” Wang said. “We would try to make a 950 ml bottle of milk last a few days, but then what would we do after that?” And it’s not just the economically marginalized who are suffering. Wang said the burden on working parents will likely increase now that people are gradually returning to work. “My former colleague was complaining that now they have to try to grab food, keep up with antigen and PCR testing, talk to their kids’ teachers, all while taking part in meetings via video call,” he said. “She’s going crazy.” Wang said the toll taken on people’s well-being was very visible in his neighborhood. “There were people who jumped off the top of the building in the residential neighborhood next to us, and I saw news of people jumping from buildings, not just in text, but video clips, which have a psychological impact in themselves,” Wang said. “It’s hard not to be depressed in such circumstances,” he said. A white-collar worker surnamed Li, who works for a large foreign company, said he has sought out psychological counseling during lockdown despite not having financial worries. “It’s like being incarcerated for one or two months,” Li said. “Loss of freedom over a long period of time will give rise to a lot of negative emotions, the most prominent of which is anger.” Photo illustration by RFA; Reuters ‘I totally lost control’ A resident of Jing’an district surnamed Sun said she had a mental breakdown over the authorities’ chaotic handling of mass COVID-19 tests, after she started to show symptoms on May 1, but was left without a PCR test despite requesting one. “On the night of May 6, I went totally crazy, calling the emergency services many times,” Sun said. “I totally lost control.” “If the ambulance hadn’t come, I would have run out right there … and started spreading the virus.” Eventually, Sun and her symptomatic family were taken to an isolation facility, but she suspects the delay in testing them was due to a political attempt to massage new case figures. She pointed to repeated complaints on social media that officials appeared to hand out test results and change them at will. “There were people testing positives and they said they were negative, and people testing negative who they said were positive,” Sun said. In universities students have complained of unclean food and lack of support for their mental health. A psychology lecturer surnamed Chen said one woman had to spend thousands of yuan to escape the city by private taxi after being stuck in a situation of food scarcity while suffering from anorexia nervosa. “She couldn’t eat, and her mental state was very bad,” he said. “She had a relapse [of anorexia] after being stuck inside the dorm building since early March.” Serene, an international school counselor, said many of her students have gone back to their parental homes, while mental health problems have doubled among those who remained. “It’s mostly about conflicts with parents, but since the pandemic also about difficulties with distance-learning,” she said. “There is also the lack of interaction with peers and lack of social support.” “One of my students was having difficulty with interpersonal communication, but he had bravely begun to take the first steps before the pandemic, and had formed some relationships,” she said. “But when the pandemic came … he told me he feared he would never make friends again.” Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.