Residents in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region have complained on social media about what they say are harsh COVID-19 lockdown measures in the sensitive region after a local outbreak.
China had largely brought domestic transmission under control through lockdowns, travel restrictions and testing, but sporadic regional outbreaks have emerged.
A new cluster in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in the middle of last month prompted fresh restrictions, with 902 cases officially reported.
Photo: Reuters
Officials said this month they had “effectively contained” the spread of the Urumqi cluster, and there have been no new cases reported in the past eight days.
However, hundreds of residents have gone on to local social media forums in the past few days to complain about harsh conditions.
With some of the comments removed, users tried to also voice their complaints on local forums on the Sina Weibo (微博) platform in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Social media users shared photographs of front doors sealed with steel crowbars, and locks installed by community workers.
“Why can’t prefectures with no cases remove the lockdown? Why do you need to lock down the whole of Xinjiang?” read one comment on Weibo, which received thousands of likes.
“Doors have been sealed, this has brought huge inconvenience to workers and people’s lives. Prices of daily items have risen ... many things I buy are expired” read another.
Some residents also wrote that they were forced by authorities to take Chinese medicine daily, and were required to film themselves doing so.
One video from Saturday showed dozens of high-rise residents in Urumqi yelling from their windows in despair.
Stranded migrant workers, university students, business travelers and tourists also complained about not being able to leave Xinjiang.
“I have even taken three nucleic acid tests ... but community workers won’t let me leave,” one user wrote on a message board run by the state-run People’s Daily.
Urumqi authorities yesterday said that lockdowns would be eased in areas that had no virus cases, according to a report in the state-run tabloid Global Times.
About half of Xinjiang’s more than 21 million people are ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims, many of whom complain of decades of political and religious oppression by the Chinese Communist Party, which the government denies.
Activists have accused the Chinese government of incarcerating about 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang camps.
Beijing has described them as vocational training centers to counter Islamic radicalism.
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