(Bloomberg) -- The Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper called on the nation to support President Xi Jinping’s Covid Zero strategy, showing any shift in policy is unlikely even as lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere threaten to hurt the economy. 

In a front-page commentary Monday, the People’s Daily said Xi’s strategy to snuff out the virus has proven “correct and effective” and China should be “uniting more closely around the party’s leadership with Xi Jinping as the core.” Citizens should follow the strategy “unswervingly and unrelentingly” with “earlier, faster, stricter and more practical” measures, it said.

“At present, it is the most difficult critical period for epidemic prevention and control,” the People’s Daily commentary said. China can “never let the hard-earned achievements of epidemic prevention and control be wasted,” it added.

China is struggling to contain a worsening outbreak that risks weakening growth in the world’s second-largest economy and disrupting global supply chains. The crisis has turned into one of the biggest tests yet for Xi, who is likely to seek a third five-year term during a Communist Party congress later this year. 

Tens of millions of people in the city of Shanghai and the northeastern province of Jilin have been barred from leaving their homes, fueling widespread criticisms of his government’s response to the highly infectious omicron variant. Residents short of groceries, medical care and patience have have publicly aired their grievances in rare displays of dissent against the Communist Party. 

More Chinese authorities are heeding Xi’s call to implement stringent movement restrictions to curb the virus. Over the weekend the western city of Xi’an came under a partial-lockdown for four days. The central city Zhengzhou also locked down its airport district for two weeks and started mass testing in the area on Monday. 

“Practice over the past two years has proven that the general strategy and policy of normalized epidemic prevention and control are correct and effective,” People’s Daily said. It ran a similar front-page commentary defending Xi’s Covid Zero strategy earlier this month, saying the policy is essential to saving lives and keeping the economy going. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.


Inside Shanghai quarantine: 24-hour lights, no

hot showers

17 Apr, 2022

The National Exhibition and Convention Centre in China was converted into a quarantine facility set up for people who tested positive but have few or no symptoms on April 15, in Shanghai. 

Photo / AP

Beibei sleeps beside thousands of strangers in rows of cots in a high-ceilinged exhibition centre. The lights stay on all night, and the 30-year-old real estate saleswoman has yet to find a hot shower.

Beibei and her husband were ordered into the massive National Exhibition and Convention Centre in Shanghai last Tuesday after spending 10 days isolated at home following a positive test. Their 2-year-old daughter, who was negative, went to her grandfather, while her nanny also went into quarantine.

Residents show "no obvious symptoms", Beibei, who asked to be identified only by her given name, told The Associated Press in an interview by video phone.

"There are people coughing," she said. "But I have no idea if they have laryngitis or Omicron."

The convention centre, with 50,000 beds, is one of more than 100 quarantine facilities set up in China's most populous city for those such as Beibei who test positive but have few or no symptoms. It's part of official efforts to contain China's biggest coronavirus outbreak since the two-year-old pandemic began. But it's also testing the patience of people increasingly fed up with China's harsh "zero-Covid" policy that aims to isolate every case.

Medical workers wearing protective suits chat as a resident takes a rest at the newly converted quarantine facility in Shanghai. 
Photo / AP

"At the beginning, people were frightened and panicked," Beibei said. "But with the publication of daily figures, people have started to accept that this particular virus is not that horrible."

Beibei was told she was due to be released Monday after two negative tests while at the convention centre.
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Most of Shanghai shut down starting March 28 and its 25 million people were ordered to stay home. That led to complaints about food shortages and soaring economic losses.

Anyone who tests positive but shows few or no symptoms is required to spend one week in a quarantine facility. Beibei said she had a stuffy nose and briefly lost part of her senses of taste and smell, but those symptoms passed in a few days.

On Sunday, China reported 26,155 new cases, all but 3,529 of which had no symptoms. Shanghai accounted for 95 per cent of the total, or 24,820, including 3,238 with no symptoms.

A temporary Covid-19 testing lab is seen in an arena in Shanghai, China. 
Photo / AP

The city has reported more than 300,000 cases since late March. Shanghai began easing restrictions last week, though a health official warned the city didn't have its outbreak under control.

At the convention centre, residents are checked twice a day for fever and told to record health information on mobile phones, according to Beibei. Most people pass the time by reading, square dancing, taking online classes or watching videos on mobile phones.

The 420,000sq m exhibition centre is best known as the site of the world's biggest car show. Other quarantine sites include temporary prefabricated buildings.

Residents of other facilities have complained about leaky roofs, inadequate food supplies and delays in treatment for medical problems.

Meal for the people in the Chinese quarantine facility in Shanghai. 
Photo / AP

"We haven't found a place with a hot shower," Beibei said. "Lights are on all night, and it's hard to fall asleep."

A video obtained by AP showed wet beds and floors due to a leaky roof in a different facility in a prefabricated building.

"Bathrooms are not very clean," Beibei said. "So many people use them, and volunteers or cleaners can't keep up."


Covid 19: Riots break out in Shanghai as

starving residents revolt against 'Zero

Covid' lockdown


By Frank Chung news.com.au

Riots have broken out in Shanghai as starving residents begin to revolt against the Chinese Communist Party's draconian "Zero Covid" lockdown more than three weeks in.

Disturbing videos emerging on social media show desperate scenes inside China's largest city, which has been placed under increasingly harsh restrictions as Omicron cases continue to break daily records.

Customers look through empty shelves at a supermarket in Shanghai, China, in late March. Photo / AP

Crowds of residents were seen looting food parcels in one video posted to Weibo, while other clips showed furious mobs clashing with PPE-clad Covid prevention workers as they tried to break through barriers erected across the city.

One video captured the sounds of screaming from apartment balconies as people run out of food, while in another viral clip a man was filmed hurling abuse at an apparent government worker over the phone.



"My parents are locked up by you for two months. How did they live for these two months? My grandmother lives alone, nobody takes care of her. You locked us up. What does she drink? What does she eat? You are driving [people] to death. F**k you! Shanghai city government, are they human? Driving ordinary people to revolt ... I don't care anymore. Just let the Communist Party take me. Where is the Communist Party? Where is communism? You bastards!"

More than 23,600 new infections were recorded on Friday despite Shanghai residents now suffering under the harshest Covid-19 restrictions anywhere in the world since the start of the pandemic, straining the regime's policy of total elimination of the virus.

Residents have been barred from leaving their homes even for essential items, leaving many warning they are running out of food as shops and delivery services collapse under the pressure and government deliveries of vegetables, meat and eggs struggle to keep up.

Shanghai residents are barred from leaving their homes in a strict Zero-Covid lockdown. Photo / Getty Images
Shanghai residents are barred from leaving their homes in a strict Zero-Covid lockdown. Photo / Getty Images

"It is true there are some difficulties in ensuring the supply of daily necessities," local official Liu Min conceded on Wednesday.

It comes after a government worker was filmed chasing down a Corgi and beating it to death with a shovel because its owner was infected, in a horrifying video that went viral on Weibo.

The owner had released the dog onto the streets because he could not find anyone to care for it while he was in quarantine, China News Weekly reported.

"We hoped to let him outside and be like a stray dog," he wrote on Weibo.

"We didn't want him to starve to death. As long as he could live it would be okay. We never expected that he would be beaten to death the moment we had left."

When Omicron first emerged in Shanghai a month ago only specific buildings and complexes were placed under lockdown, but last week the government announced the city was being divided in two with different restrictions for each half.

On Monday, however, the full lockdown was extended to the entire city's population of 26 million.

The citywide lockdown is indefinite.

"The situation in Shanghai is scary," Michael Smith, North Asia correspondent for The Australian Financial Review, wrote on Twitter.

"Reports of millions struggling to feed themselves, elderly unable to access medicine, videos of small riots breaking out circulating on social media. Many households relying on inadequate government food deliveries. All this to contain a virus the Chinese government claims hasn't killed anyone in the city yet."

Workers labour at the site of a temporary hospital being constructed at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai) in east China's Shanghai. Photo / AP
Workers labour at the site of a temporary hospital being constructed at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai) in east China's Shanghai. Photo / AP

Mass daily testing is mandatory and anyone who tests positive is taken to a quarantine centre — a policy that even saw children removed from their parents into overcrowded facilities.

Shanghai officials were forced to respond to the public outrage by allowing parents to accompany their Covid-positive children to quarantine.

Jared T Nelson, an American lawyer living in Shanghai, has been sharing updates about the lockdown on Twitter.

He stressed that it was a "huge city" and circumstances were different everywhere.

On Saturday, he said rules for his building had been tightened again. While previously people had been allowed to go outside to get deliveries, residents had now been barred from leaving their apartments.

"Each day two volunteers from each building are allowed out to collect deliveries for the whole building (I'm a volunteer)," he wrote.

"We have to wear the full white suit during the process — mine was just delivered to me — and we only have a two hour window in the afternoon. If you have a delivery in the morning, for example of meat (if you are lucky enough to get that), it will sit at the gate until it is our time in the afternoon to get the delivery. The temperature in Shanghai right now, at 5pm, is 80F [27C]."

He added, "For my family, we had three deliveries that were booked to deliver today: two group purchases of meat/seafood plus one individual purchase of soap and shampoo. All three were cancelled."

Nelson said that on Friday night, several Covid-positive people from his community had been taken to a quarantine centre.

"From what we've heard, they didn't arrive until 2am and the conditions there are awful — no showers, portable toilets only, no hot water, and of course no privacy," he wrote.

China is one of the few nations still persisting with a zero Covid strategy, even though its full vaccination rate is approaching 90 per cent.

Other parts of China have been subjected to similar restrictions in the past month, including Shenzhen, Changchun, Xuzhou, Tangshan and Jilin. At one point in March, almost 40 million Chinese residents were under various levels of lockdown, according to CNN.

The US State Department on Friday said it was allowing non-emergency staff and their families to leave the Shanghai consulate due to the situation, while advising US citizens to reconsider travel to China "due to arbitrary enforcement of local laws and Covid-19 restrictions".

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says while it is not saying "don't go", Australians should "exercise a high degree of caution".

"Recent Covid-19 outbreaks in Shanghai and other large cities have resulted in city-wide residential lockdowns, closures of schools, businesses and suspension of public transport," DFAT says in its latest travel advisory.

"Access to medical facilities and other essential services has also been disrupted. Further Covid-19 outbreaks throughout China are possible and countermeasures including flight suspensions and re-routing, and mass testing may be imposed with little or no warning. Stay informed of local conditions, particularly if you intend to travel within China."