There follows a guest post by Dr. David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology in the Norwich Medical School at UEA, who says the extreme Chinese response to Covid in Shanghai gives a new meaning to an old word.
shăng-hī′, shăng′hī″
transitive verb
- To kidnap (a man) for compulsory service aboard a ship, especially after drugging him.
- To induce or compel (someone) to do something, especially by fraud or force.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
Forgive me if this verb is now unacceptable. I fear it is unwoke, but I mean no harm. My usage is apposite. It’s the poor bloody Shanghainese who are being Shanghaied.
Following rising case numbers, China is applying its ‘Dynamic Zero Covid’ strategy to its principal commercial centre, a metropolis of 25 million souls, where the old and new cities face one another across the curving Huangpu River. The old side – full of ghosts from the International Settlement – has the Bund at its heart, a few blocks of stone-built European trading houses long ago converted to Government offices. On its corner with Nanking Road stands the art deco Cathay (Peace) Hotel where I used to drink gin slings while listening to old Chinese men playing jazz, anaesthetising myself before returning to freezing quarters at the Academy of Sciences, where I was lodged. The new side – Pudong – comprises gridded neon-jewelled streets of skyscrapers, offices and restaurants. It sprang up, quite suddenly, around 25 years ago, and buzzes with China’s new wealth, though it’s thin on soul or ghosts. On recent visits, hosts have insisted on entertaining me there, though I’d rather drift back to the Bund.
The bizarre plan was to lock down the new side of Shanghai for five days, then the old, conducting mass testing to identify and isolate cases. But this has swiftly morphed into a lockdown of the whole city. Everyone is being tested repeatedly and those found positive are sent to vast quarantine hostels, principally the ‘Expo’ international exhibition centre. Infected children have been separated from uninfected parents; a corgi whose owners were quarantined was clubbed to death, and there are widespread problems in obtaining food. Streets are empty except for robot dogs sent to bark at those ignoring the lockdown. Circling drones exhort compliance from above. Even Melbourne’s nightmare looks humane in comparison.
All this has been reported widely. What’s much more interesting and unique is an interview that Freddie Sayers of UnHerd managed with a Ukrainian marketing manager for a Chinese music company, Jane Polubotko. I urge you to watch it. She was quarantined following an ‘abnormal’ test result and has since been stuck at the Expo Centre for 11 days.
The living is very communal. Capacity is 4,000. You and a stranger share a cubicle which corresponds to the area normally allocated to a small trade stand. There are no walls between cubicles. Washing is at long rows of sinks. The detainees wander about, laundering their clothes and awaiting their further Covid tests. These are done alternate days, with Jane’s flipping erratically positive and negative, she told us. She might be let out after four consecutive negative tests, she thinks, though she’s not entirely clear. Her consulate hasn’t been able to help and has other matters on its mind. The staff wear hazmat suits, but the inmates have only medical masks with all their questionable efficacy.
Jane took us on a tour, filming with her smartphone. No one looked desperately sick, and Jane said nothing about anyone being so. Not a single background cough interrupted the interview. She’d been a bit unwell at the time she was first confined, she acknowledged, but now seemed fully recovered. All things considered she was remarkably sanguine.
What Freddie and UnHerd didn’t do was to try to square this material with an Associated Press article, published on April 8th:
On Thursday, the [Chinese] Government reported 23,107 new cases nationwide, all but 1,323 of whom had no symptoms. That included 19,989 in Shanghai, where only 329 had symptoms.
This equates to only 5.7% of ‘cases’ identified nationally being symptomatic, and only 1.6% in Shanghai. Such tiny proportions are far below the international norm, where 25-75% of identified cases typically are symptomatic. They do, however, tally with the fact that Shanghai is repeatedly testing its entire 25 million population. Used 25 million times, a test with 99.9% specificity will throw up 25,000 false positives. And while we don’t know the details of the Chinese testing in terms of performance, methods, cycle threshold, let alone lab QC, it’s unlikely they’ll achieve better than 99.9% specificity.
It follows that Jane’s fellow detainees likely comprise a mix of a few true positives along with a much larger number of false positives. This inference agrees with most of those caught on Jane’s camera looking perfectly well. Incarcerating this mix together in a vast dormitory is the perfect way to ensure that the true positives infect the false positives. You might describe the whole facility as a very large Covid incubator, working exactly as U.S. military training camps did in the 1918 flu.
China’s Covid policy risks bringing a new depth of meaning to that dubious old verb.
Stop Press: Rioting has broken out in some parts of Shanghai, as starving locals loot food shops. MailOnline has more. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reports that the Shanghai lockdown risks becoming the biggest crisis of Xi’s Presidency.
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In the BC Era, I quite fancied visiting China.
But even a 0.1% chance of being stuck in an endless cycle of “testing” is enough for me to think, “Perhaps instead a road trip to Kharkov…”
I will tell you what. What is going on in Shanghai right now is not funny. It is a horror story. Endless testing is the least of these people’s problem. How exactly does China plan on feeding 22 million people locked down? They don’t is the short answer. Great way to cull your population 22 million at a time. At this rate they can wipe out a billion in a dew years?
“Let China sleep, for when she awakes the whole world will regret”.
Certainly woke us up with your covid bollocks.
Mind you, the RPTB were waiting for it with open arms.
If there are 19989 “cases” in Shanghai and all who test positive are sent to detention centres (“quarantine hostels”), “principally” the Expo centre which can hold 4000 inmates, what has happened to the other 15989 people?
I realise they may have been spread among a large number of smaller places, but the question is where have they actually been taken.
According to the Daily Mail, drones are giving instructions such as “Please comply with Covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
Hey – are the ruling elite afraid of something?
As for the “robot dogs”, this is what you get if you don’t even try to understand the significance of “self-driving cars”, “artificial intelligence”, and a host of technological changes and in-development technologies, to which the only possible genuine human response is Luddite. (It is to be noted that the political tendency that is supposed to be more concerned than all the others with issues of what human beings are doing to the “environment” that human beings live in, which is to say the “greens”, ignore this single most important theme of our times – technofascism – just as much as all their supposed “rivals”.)
I would like to know more about life in flats in Shanghai. Are there concierges in almost every block who work for the secret police? Are locked-down residents allowed to go where the chutes are to throw away their rubbish? (I am assuming that most flats don’t have individual chutes inside self-contained accommodation or its curtilage, and that on the contrary most chutes are communal, as they are in social housing or ex-social housing flats in Britain.)
According the South China Morning Post,
Can’t believe some admire this, unbelievable
Just like our population here back in March 2020, they WANT it. They believe in it, they think it’s the right thing to do and so, just like we did back then, they deserve everything they are getting.
I have no sympathy for 25 million people being guarded by what, a few thousand police? Tens of thousands, perhaps?
They could break free any time they liked.
The things I feel most sorry for are the brains of the poor Shanghainese, which have been taken down the state laundret, and forced through the CCPs brain-washing-machine on a spin cycle. The country is an informational vacuum, even the internet consists of only state-approved content. The Chinese people are blinded to the other side of the proverbial coin. It’s no wonder they’re willing to comply en masse!
I lived in the USSR for a while. The media wasn’t pluralist, but nobody believed the country’s bosses or what party officials or nomenklaturists told them. On the contrary, the assumption was that they were a bunch of lying a*seholes. The indoctrination of the population was far less successful there than in Britain.
One has to spend time in China to grasp the extent to which the Chinese feel their country is superior to the any in the west and think their government is wonderful.
Hence the popular saying in the old USSR: There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda!
David101,
A great description – why does it remind me of the state run media elsewhere – like Britain for instance?
I don’t think the 22 million locked down right now are so blinded.
Many British people, if they were told by any kind of authority figure “It’s your turn now – just stand there while we kill you”, would stand there and let themselves be killed, so long as politicians and newsreaders had told them the “reason” beforehand on the television.
But many is not all. Great to hear that one in three in London have avoided “vaccination”.
Did you see how some Italians were singing “Bella Ciao” during lockdown? It’s a beautiful song, one of my favourites, but the combination of this song, people’s conditions, and their actions – or more exactly their inaction – is totally batsh*t.
Most citizens of most countries think their country is The Best. Why else do they repeatedly take up arms (literally or metaphorically) against humans they have never met and about whom they know nothing, just because their beloved leaders tell them to? It’s a recurring theme of human nature. Sadly.
Yes when a neighbour told me last year during lockdown, “we must do as we are told” I responded, “would you please step into that oven”. People really do not have a clue what is going on. It will not end pretty for any of us.
I don’t think they can break out whenever they please. This is a heavily monitored country and those who break the rules are punished. It could be loss of livelihood, housing, bank acct, food, medicine, life.
Local authority executives in Britain will be drooling at the thought of doing the same or worse here, in urban areas.
Bloody too right. I live in a beautiful part of the country but our town is slowly becoming an utter shithole by a Labour badged mafia that is raping it and us.
According to Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert fame, who is advising people how to stay warm without using their heating due to the exorbitant costs of it (hot water bottles in sleeping bags apparently), the UK is not far from civil unrest.
So, all going according to plan in UK then.
The State Can Abduct Children Through CPS ‘Medical Kidnapping’: Rep. Tammy Nichols
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-state-can-abduct-children-through-cps-medical-kidnapping-rep-tammy-nichols_4392425.html
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While visiting Portland, Oregon, I visited the Shanghai tunnels, and learned exactly how “Shanghaiing” was done: in bars, men would be lured over a trapdoor, perhaps with the help of a pretty woman, and the trapdoor would open, sending the man into the tunnels below.
Today’s methods might not involve trapdoors, but I dread to think what the modern equivalent would be.
It also brings a whole new meaning to the word “expert”, doesn’t it? The “experts” are telling us to believe the results of the PCR test / lateral flow test, while the original “expert” who designed the blessed thing claims in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t designed as a diagnostic tool!
Other “experts” have set the Ct-threshold of the tests used on the public way higher than many “experts” would recommend. And hence we see a quarantine facility populated with mainly the healthy, BEING INFECTED by the few unhealthy detainees!
This is the most visible and obvious reminder yet that in most countries, and especially China whose communist one-party state allows all manner of atrocities to be visited upon the population with impunity, that there is something much deeper going on than the official facade of “Public Health protection” would suggest.
Careful – you might be labelled a conspiwacy theewist, innit?
Also never forget that label was dreamt up by the CIA to marginalise those who had the brass neck to think that the official narrative around the blowing off of JFK’s head was, erm, less than convincing.
I’m starting to find these reports funny, even hilarious. Does this make me a bad person?
The fact that rioting has only broken out “in some parts of Shanghai” tells you everything that you need to know about Chinese people and the future of the world should the Chinese yoke ever be put on humanity at large.
I think the term for this kind of incarceration is ‘concentration camp’
What is going on in Shanghai should scare the life out of everyone. Funny isn’t it when Boris and the eu and Biden tell the world what a terrible person putin is and watch Xi incarcerate 22 million people inside their apts, many with little if any food or medicines. Crickets. Not a single word from anyone. A disgrace.