It has a vast army dedicated to ensuring that the wrong message doesn’t get out. Yet, the Chinese government could not keep the video of a live person being zipped up and readied for the mortuary from going viral. Now that the damage has been done, it has been trying to make amends: the director of the old-age home where this happened has been sacked, the licence of the doctor involved cancelled and four senior health officials face an enquiry — three of them have been removed from their posts.

Ever since it was locked down more than a month back, Shanghai has challenged the limits of Chinese authority. The country’s unique zero-Covid model, involving stringent lockdowns and mass testing, has kept deaths low but made citizens angry. So were Wuhan’s citizens when the pandemic broke out, but at that time, the virus was an unknown danger. Today, the Chinese know that the rest of the world has chosen to live with the virus. Moreover, Shanghai’s international importance gives its citizens a clout no other Chinese city enjoys. Another factor contributing to their anger is the fatigue that has set in among health workers.

No wonder then that a German who lashed out at a Chinese translator calling from the neighbourhood Covid committee was hailed as a hero when the conversation went viral, even though the German abused the Chinese government throughout. Having tested positive, the German had been taken to a quarantine centre and then released. The translator called to inform him that ‘they’ were coming to take him to the quarantine centre that very night, because he hadn’t tested negative. He argued that no one had come to test him for 12 days and now he was fine; if they took him away, he would call the international media and the embassy.

Familiar script

Interestingly, even while the German, using profanities all the time, told the translator that he had no intention of obeying ‘them’, the latter, laughing nervously, kept saying ‘they’ would come for him anyway.

It was this ability to talk back that made netizens applaud the foreigner: “Chinese people need German mouths to say what the Chinese people want to”; “Foreign forces to the rescue!” commented netizens. A few days before this, the recorded conversation between an elderly Chinese and a neighbourhood committee member had generated only despair. The old man’s symptoms were getting worse and he wanted to be admitted to a hospital, but the worker said that he couldn’t get the higher-ups to move. Their roles were reversed as the conversation progressed; the old man began calming down the health worker, who kept shouting about the uselessness of the system, threatening to resign as he could no longer deal with his failure to help people in distress.

Official media reported little of this. But given the extent of public anger, they’ve had to take note. Rotten food delivered to locked-down neighbourhoods, the death of a nurse from an asthma attack because her hospital was closed for disinfection and other mishaps came to light in the official media only when action taken against those responsible was reported. Despite this, the officials keep touting the need for continuing the “dynamic” zero-Covid policy, which has now become a prestige issue, to be persisted with even against the advice of everyone on the ground.

As the helpless cadre told the old man: “My hands are tied, I’m sorry I can do nothing. They’re not taking care of the elderly, or pregnant women, or older people who have died. They’re not even collecting the trash! Why? How did Shanghai come to this?”