A viral video showing the repercussions of the confinement of Shanghai about its inhabitants was erased from the Chinese internet by censors, sparking misunderstanding and even anger from netizens on Saturday.
Entitled “Siyue Zhi sheng” (“The Voices of April”), the six-minute video is a sequence of Shanghai shot from the air.
The author added to these black and white images, in chronological order, a succession of sounds taken from press conferences, videos posted on social networks and phone calls from the inhabitants.
Details
The video begins with the voices of political leaders who, at the beginning of the outbreak of coronavirus in March, they said that a short precautionary confinement was not a good idea due to its economic repercussions.
The video presents twenty sound extracts of confined inhabitants who cannot obtain food, medicine or go to the hospital; a man prevented from returning to the confined quarter of him; or a woman describing the chaos in the quarantine centers.
The video was widely shared on Friday night on the social network WeChatbut the censors managed to erase all traces in a matter of hours.
“This video is nothing special. Its content was already known. But the fact that even that is censored annoys me,” one user wrote on Saturday.
As a sign of discontent, many Internet users shared in WeChat musical clips of two songs with anti-establishment lyrics such as “Do You Hear the People Sing?” (from the musical “Les Miserables”) and “Another Brick In The Wall” (from the group Pink Floyd).
The first is a call to rebellion. The second lambasts “thought control” in particular.
The economic capital of Chinawith a population of 25 million people, is facing its worst outbreak of covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
AFP