The Highwire with Del Bigtree - BIG TROUBLE IN BEIJING

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

Uncertainty clouds the coverage of what appears to be brutal lockdown of countless numbers in Shanghai. Now, reports are coming, in the form of viral videos leaked to social media, indicating Lockdowns have spread to another major city in China.#ChinaLockdowns #BeijingLockdownBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

One of the bigger stories that I'm seeing across the world is what's still continuing to happen in China. So we saw in Beijing a lockdown now, and this was in Shanghai. So the Shanghai lockdown was the first one. We saw high rises of people screaming because they were trapped in there, people being tested and protesting too, which was very rare for China, mass protests, mass testing. We also saw people fighting for food because the supermarkets. markets were running low on food because this is the major container port for the for shipping and for

industry so the food was having a problem getting there quarantine centers they were separating kids you probably see that from the video there that was all happening in shanghai it's been going on for really over a month now and that is now spilling over into Beijing so this is what the headlines have been showing over this past week when word was coming that Beijing may lock down we saw this new york times shanghai's food crisis prompt residents in Beijing, these stockpile supplies. So Beijing is comprised. It's China's capital city. So a lot of their governance, politics are headquartered there. And it has 16 districts. So of those 16 districts, there's about 12 of them right now that are that are on a mild lockdown with mandatory testing.

So this was the headline. And we saw this same ramp up in Shanghai. So they're now testing in Beijing, 20 million residents. So Beijing expands COVID mass testing to nearly 20 million residents as it races to avoid Shanghai-style lockdown. So as we speak, these Beijing residents living and working in 12 of these 16 districts have been ordered to take three consecutive nucleic acid tests. That started Tuesday, Wednesday, and now today. And that was what they're finding from those is basically just over 500 cases. 50. That's 50 in the last 24 hours. Now again, it's over over 20 million residents in this city. So just put that in context.

LA County has just over 10 million people. And yesterday, they tallied 2,484 COVID cases. New York City, close to, that's a little closer to Beijing. So it's close to 20 million residents. They had 3,100 cases yesterday. So Beijing is doing these lockdowns, measures, with just over 50 cases. And we know that this Amicron variant at this moment

is mainly asymptomatic cases, as we saw in Shanghai as well. So it's kind of fascinating that this COVID zero thing is still being pursued, not only in Shanghai, after seeing the disaster over this last basically two months, but Beijing seems to be entering that. And they're beginning to reopen isolation centers. So this was the headline here.

Beijing reopens isolation center in attempt to avoid lockdown. This thing has been closed since the 2020, I get the Wuhan situation in China. And now they're postponing schools, Beijing to postpone school reopening for at least one week after Labor Day holiday. So they're postponing kindergarten colleges all the way up to high schools until May 11th, up until now. We know how that works, these long, drip lockdowns that just seem to keep going. But what's interesting here, I found in Time Magazine, kind of a window into the politics in China. There's a lot of people guessing about what may be going on. But this

was a pretty straightforward article, what a Beijing COVID-19 lockdown would mean for China and the world. And it says here, the Shanghai lockdown in particular has been a grueling test of patience for the city's 25 million inhabitants with reports of tense confrontations with authorities and even rare protests. But the CCP will not allow anyone to describe the measure as a failure, says Steve saying, director of the S-O-A-S China Institute in London. He says, a full lockdown in Beijing with similar levels of mismanagement in Shanghai will be seen by many outside of China as a demonstration of failure, but will not be allowed to be portrayed in China, Sengtells Time. So this is really interesting.

Now, they talked in that article about the disruptions of the food supply chain. We talked about that last week. Shanghai had a bigger impact on that because Shanghai is one of the world's largest shipping ports. It's also one of the largest manufacturing hubs in the world. Beijing is more of a political center. So it does have relevance as far as symbolism. And we know that Ziji Peng, he's going into, an election year in the fall here.

So for China to steer away from the COVID zero policy at this point seems very unlikely. So we're just kind of tracking this in Beijing. But really one of the big stories coming out of China is the censorship. And you know, we get windows into this. How bad is it? It is really that bad as we hear. But these are the articles, some of the reporting on it. And it does seem to be pretty concerning.

Like Wuhan all over again, as Shanghai protests China censors. And I looked around and I did find a gentleman. gentleman, he is a China business and finance writer for the Economist magazine. His name is Don Winland. And on his Twitter account, you can check out what he's been saying. He's been in Shanghai for quite some time. And he says this on his Twitter account, just several days ago. Today is my 46 day in quarantine lockdown in Shanghai since March 3rd.

I feel like a prisoner of the Chinese state. He was able to publish an article in The Economist. This was the title. It's an eye-catching title. Lockdown in Shanghai, I've caught a glimpse of our techno-dispopian future. I pulled some quotes here. I think it's very important for the listeners and people watching this to read along this with me and check it out.

He says here, across Chinese social media, the story of the lockdown has been typed out in a kind of disappearing digital ink. People take to their phones and computers to rant about food shortages or medical disasters or to post footage of large protests only to see their complaints scrubbed from the internet by China's army of sensors. For a time, the word Shanghai became unsearchable as if the communist party was pretending the city didn't exist as long as it was ripe with COVID. He says scoring meals can mean hours of monitoring your phone with tens of thousands of people trying to purchase the same small quantity of goods at any one time. Quick typing, fevering,

refreshing, and repeated pressing of buy buttons are essential. Digital breadlines form with many ending up empty handed as supplies run out in seconds. And he finishes off by saying the government is cracking down a dissenters. Police visit people who post unfavorable commentary on Twitter. Signs in COVID camps warn patients that posting images of their surroundings and social media could violate the law. Now, some chilling commentary there. Yeah. And go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, no. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Well, I was just saying, you know, these images that were, I mean, I, with all of this, and I just want to sort of give a caveat here, because I don't know what the truth is. I don't know who this guy is. And to everyone,

out there. We like to have a reporter on the ground. We would love to have someone from the high wire in China or someone that we know to really report out. But we're seeing these crazy images, right? I mean, we're seeing people being handcuffed, apparently, that, you know, didn't, didn't go out and get tested. This is videos coming out that are all lined up. Is this real? Is this staged? Is there some film crew nearby? Is this what China wants us all to believe is happening? Is this what our own media wants us to believe is happening? I mean, I don't know. Did you see this image that came out this week of little kids that are going to school in Shanghai in full PPE? I mean, it's just, it's hard to imagine that this is real.

As you see these little children going off, you know, you've got this, a couple of these kids are just a hot mess, their gears falling off. But what I want to say about it, Jeffrey, is that we don't know what the truth is. I don't know if China is propagating this. I don't necessarily trust our own media or our own government or what they're trying to say. But here's what we do know as we look at this. And whether that guy writing for the economist is a real human being, yes, we can try to assume he is. I think we should be careful.

But somebody, somewhere, especially China, clearly wants us to believe that an approach towards COVID is zero COVID, where complete lockdown of everything, locking in your house, ripping people out of their homes to turn them into quarantine facilities, sticking in them in giant stadiums, is a possible future for people in humanity. That's an image they want in their heads.

It's something they want us to believe. And even if it's make-believe, it's terrifying that these are images that we are being taught to accept. And that's what I want to put out there's the caveat from what we're doing here. And by the way, if you're out there and you know someone in China

would like to be an inside reporter that you know that you can vet and vie for, please go ahead and have them contact us, whistleblower at I can decide. dot org. We'd really like to get down to what's really taking place from someone we trust. I just want to put that out there.