Tuesday, 19 April 2022
Suspiciously Quiet
Karen Harradine has a piece in TCW on the Shanghai lockdown. Here in the UK it's one of those stories which has been receiving some media prominence but has tended to be edged out by Ukraine, relentless finger-pointing at Boris, and celebrity guff.
THE chattering classes have been very busy flying the Ukrainian flag in their social media bios but are suspiciously quiet about the horrifying human rights abuses taking place in China.
Three weeks ago, on March 28, the Chinese Community Party (CCP) put the city of Shanghai into lockdown on the basis of just 425 mild cold cases. None of the 26million inhabitants are allowed to leave their homes. The military patrols the streets and have sealed apartments with metal locks, turning homes into prisons and depriving residents of fresh air, food, medical supplies and human contact.
To my mind the whole piece is well worth reading for a number of reasons, one of which is simply the extraordinarily sinister nature of the Shanghai lockdown. Why take such horrifically draconian measures? There are some obvious answers such as this one -
Xi has tightened his grip on Shanghai, the freest, most cosmopolitan place in China, as it’s the city most likely to revolt against his seizing yet another term as ruler later this year. Thanks to its cruel Covid-19 policies and its economic overreach, the CCP’s reign is faltering, and like all threatened regimes, it seeks to beat down its citizens into blind obedience.
Maybe we should be more concerned about Shanghai because of what it tells us about lockdown as a policy. It should have been consigned to the errors of history, but Shanghai suggests it wasn't.
The merciless horror that is Shanghai should discredit the notion of lockdown for ever. Yet not a word of criticism has been uttered by Western governments against China’s latest barbarism. The Biden administration refuses to condemn this dystopian nightmare, perhaps an indication that it seeks to emulate this. Covid zealot Dr Anthony Fauci threatened the US with further lockdowns a month ago.
Fresh from strutting around Kyiv like a preening peacock, supporting Ukraine’s right to freedom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn’t apply the same idealism to Britain on his return. Interviewed on GB News, in typical dictator fashion Johnson threatened the British people with another lockdown. He also had the audacity to claim that lockdowns saved lives whereas the opposite is true.
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3 comments:
That's interesting from a personal point of view. Recently - certainly since March 28th - I overheard some of my wife's parishioners explaining what was happening in Shanghai, as they had family there. (It's interesting how many of the very rich people here have dealings with China...) Anyway, the gist was that lockdown was a breeze, for the Brit expats and the native Chinese. They are allowed to sit out in a sort of collective garden, until the police come and shoo them back inside. There are free deliveries of fresh food every day, and they are eating very well. Too much food, in fact! The Chinese help each other and the ex-pats out, cooking food for one another. No crisis.
Someone is not being truthful. Either Karen Harradine is over-egging it for political reasons, or some ex-pats are sending back complete lies to their aged parents in Sussex (and one can speculate about the reasons...) or some places in Shanghai are being treated very differently because there are foreigners there. Or maybe things have rapidly got worse.
Anyway, all very odd.
Once Brexit was out of the way I stopped reading the TCW blog. Some of its other policies are not to my taste - but there's nothing wrong with that, unless the authors show little self awareness that their views might not be commonly held by 'all right thinking people'.
So... the Shanghai lockdown is one of many important issues. You can argue that it is another example of some people's desire to establish control, but the characterisation of Boris seems motivated by personal dislike rather than criticism of his policies.
Sam - it would be no surprise if different people have widely different experiences, although it does show how careful we have to be with these stories. In such a huge city as Shanghai, the top 1% will be nearly 280,000 people so there may well be many stories of much better treatment than average.
DJ - I find that media outfits such as TCW are very mixed in terms of quality. It may be inevitable if they pursue a bigger audience - conformist pap is almost bound to exert a kind of gravitational pull on the output.
I think Boris is seen as a chancer, which he is, but that probably makes him a loose cannon in the eyes of many MPs and media people.
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