Shanghai rises up against Communist Covid chaos

Shanghai rises up against Communist Covid chaos as residents scuffle with hazmat-suited police who have pinned protestors to the ground for objecting to their homes becoming quarantine sites

• Shanghai residents scuffled with police after being ordered to give up homes
• Dozens of buildings in the city have been converted to makeshift isolation hubs
• Separate videos seem to show police pinning protestors to the ground 

People in Shanghai are rising up against curbs brought in as part of its zero-Covid policy.

Residents in China’s biggest city have scuffled with hazmat-suited police who have ordered them to give up their homes to Covid patients, chilling videos on social media show. 

Dozens of buildings in the city have been converted to makeshift isolation hubs as PPE-clad local officials struggle to contain record infection rates, which have surpassed 25,000 in recent days.

Separate videos posted online seem to show police pinning protestors to the ground in Shanghai, as well as in Haining, which is 125km southwest. 

Strict lockdown rules have been in place city-wide since April 3 in a bid to control the super-transmissible but milder Omicron strain.

Restrictions have seen residents confined to their homes and face food and water shortages.

Chilling video shared by social media users before being taken down shows scuffles in the streets today as cops forcibly restrained those who resisted.

Chilling clips show people being dragged to the ground by PPE-clad police after being ordered to leave their homes, according to social media posts

Authorities ordered 39 households in one development to leave their homes so their flats could be used to house infected patients, according to Zhangjiang Group, the developer of the housing complex

An elderly man in Haining, Zhejiang, around 125km from Shanghai, is pinned to the ground by PPE-clad police for going outside, in breach of Covid restrictions

Cases began rising in Shanghai in late March and have surpassed 25,000 in recent days.

The city first implemented a phased lockdown from March 28, with just parts of the city being shutdown. A full city-wide lockdown was implemented on April 3 as cases continued to rise.

But the vast majority of virus cases detected each day are in people with no symptoms — and there have been no deaths officially reported in the city since this outbreak. 

Social media has been flooded with complaints of food shortages and protests against the strict measures. 

In the latest bid to enforce a zero-Covid policy, police have been accused of dragging residents from their home as they rush to make space for Covid patients who are forced to stay isolated from their families, even if they are asymptomatic.

Authorities ordered 39 households in one development to leave their homes so their flats could be used to house infected patients, according to Zhangjiang Group, the developer of the housing complex.

In one live-streamed video, a woman reportedly asks ‘why are they taking an old person away?’ as officials appeared to put someone into a car. 

Zhangjiang Group said it had compensated the tenants and moved them into other units in the same compound. 

The developer recognised that videos of the compound that had ‘appeared on the internet’ on Thursday and said ‘the situation had now settled down’ after ‘some tenants obstructed the construction’ of a quarantine fence.

Search results for the name of the apartment complex disappeared from China’s Twitter-like Weibo by Friday morning.

Separate clips shared to Twitter appear to show police in hazmat-suits arresting protestors in Shanghai. 

Twitter-user Jennifer Zeng, a human rights activist who tweeted the clip and said the footage was from the Nashi International Community Pudong New Area in Shanghai, said one woman shouts ‘the police are hitting us’. 

Her subtitles on the clip suggest one local shouts: ‘The police beat people up. I am begging you. What do you want to do?’ 

Some Shanghai residents have poured their anger at the handling of the virus onto the internet.

They have ripped into authorities for allowing food shortages as well as heavy-handed controls, including the killing of a pet corgi by a health worker and a now-softened policy of separating infected children from their virus-free parents.

Other videos and audio clips have indicated increasing desperation among city inhabitants, including some showing residents bursting through barricades demanding food.

In one unverified viral video, a drone flying through a residential area broadcast a message urging residents to ‘control your soul’s desire for freedom’. 

Shanghai health official Wu Qianyu said on Thursday that there were only nine severe Omicron cases, mostly among older patients with underlying health conditions.

Yet authorities have vowed the city ‘would not relax in the slightest’, preparing over a hundred new quarantine facilities to receive every person who tests positive.

Pressure on the city to bring its outbreak under control is mounting from above, with President Xi Jinping warning on Wednesday that strict virus measures ‘cannot be relaxed’ and proclaiming that ‘persistence is victory,’ in a speech published by state media.  

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