Chinese Censors Bury Posts About Lockdown Shortages

Chinese censors have been ordered to flood social media with positive posts about the northwestern region of Xinjiang in an effort to muffle the barrage of complaints about food and medicine shortages.

- Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

Millions of people in at least 30 regions of mainland China have been placed under a full or partial lockdown under the communist government’s “zero-Covid” policy, which aims to stamp out a Covid outbreak as early as possible. The Ili Kazakh is also known as Yili) autonomous prefecture, home to nearly 4.5 million people, was reportedly put under a lockdown in early August without any official announcement.

The prolonged lockdown has left locals short of food and medicines, forcing them to share their grievances on the Chinese social media site Weibo. To drown out the complaints, censors were told to “open a campaign of comment flooding”, according to a leaked directive published by the China Digital Times.