Prominent Chinese commentator Hu Xijin (胡錫進) on Sunday said that as China ponders its COVID-19 policies, epidemic experts need to speak out and China ought to conduct comprehensive research and make any studies transparent to the public.
Hu’s unusual call on Chinese social media for candor and transparency earned him 34,000 likes on the popular Sina Weibo microblogging platform, as well as frank responses from commentators in a normally tightly policed Internet quick to censor voices deemed a risk to social stability.
China’s top leaders warned in May amid the COVID-19 lockdown of Shanghai and widespread restrictions in the Chinese capital, Beijing, that they would fight any comment or action that distorted, doubted or repudiated the country’s COVID-19 policies.
Photo: Reuters
“About the future, China needs very rational research and calculations,” said Hu, a former editor-in-chief of nationalist state tabloid the Global Times.
“Experts must speak out, and the country should organize comprehensive studies and make them transparent to the public: What are the pros and cons for our common people, and what are the overall pros and cons for the country?” he wrote.
China has significantly tightened its epidemic prevention policies this year to contain the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, even as its death toll since the COVID-19 pandemic began remains low — about 5,226 as of Saturday — and as many other countries let go of tough restrictions and learn to live with the virus.
“Oppose excessive epidemic prevention,” one user wrote in response to Hu’s post.
In the name of putting the lives of people first, entire cities have been subjected to varying degrees of lockdown, while the infected or suspected cases are confined in facilities or at home, and local populations are required to take a polymerase chain reaction test every two to three days or be barred from public amenities and spaces.
“I don’t mind being infected, but I fear you can’t help but stop me from moving freely,” another person wrote.
Even Chinese-controlled Hong Kong is moving to scrap its controversial COVID-19 hotel quarantine policy for all arrivals, more than two-and-a-half years after it was first implemented, and just weeks ahead of a major Chinese Communist Party congress in Beijing next month when President Xi Jinping (習近平) is expected to secure a precedent-breaking third term as China’s leader.
Macau is also planning to reopen its borders to mainland tour groups in November, the Chinese special administrative region surprised with an announcement on Saturday.
“The people must trust the state, but the state must also trust the understanding of the people,” Hu said.
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
DARK WARNINGS: If Trump survives his court trials, neither the Supreme Court nor the US Constitution could stop him from becoming president for life, a ‘Post’ column said Former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to rule out abusing power if he returns to the White House after Fox News host Sean Hannity asked him to respond to growing criticism of his rhetoric. The Republican presidential front-runner has talked about targeting his rivals — referring to them as “vermin” — and vowed to seek retribution if he wins a second term for what he argues are politically motivated prosecutions against him. As Trump has dominated the Republican presidential primary, US President Joe Biden has stepped up his own warnings, contending that Trump is “determined to destroy American democracy.” “Under no
ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Meta did not publicly link the account network to the Chinese government, but said it is based in China and sought to inflate divisions within the US Someone in China created thousands of fake social media accounts designed to appear to be from Americans and used them to spread polarizing political content in an apparent effort to divide the US ahead of next year’s presidential elections, Meta said on Thursday. The network of about 4,800 fake accounts was attempting to build an audience when it was identified and eliminated by the tech company, which owns Facebook and Instagram. The accounts sported fake photos, names and locations as a way to appear like everyday American Facebook users weighing in on political issues. Instead of spreading fake content as other networks