The western world has been given a rare, intimate look inside the confines of a Chinese
Covid-19 concentration camp, after Financial Times Shanghai correspondent Thomas
Hale was ensnared by the President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid regime.
It’s not that Hale had tested positive. Merely being designated as a “close contact”
was enough to sentence him to 10 days of confinement on a secret island camp identified
only as “P7.”
Hale provides a primer on framework of China’s system works:
“PCR testing in China is an almost daily ritual and testing booths are common on many street corners.They look vaguely like food stalls, except they’re larger and cube-shaped and a worker inside sits behind Plexiglas cut with two arm holes.
They are merely the surface machinery of a vast monitoring system. China’s digital Covid pass resembles track-and-trace programmes elsewhere, except it’s mandatory and it works. Using Alipay or WeChat, the country’s two major apps, a QR code is linked to each person’s most recent test results. The code must be scanned to get in anywhere, thereby tracking your location. Green means you can enter; red means you have a problem.”
Hale’s journey into Covid madness started with an innocent outing at a Shanghai bar.
Apparently, someone who’d also been at the bar tested positive. Via the tracking system, the
authorities knew Hale had been there too.
Hale had “won” some kind of terrible lottery: On the day he was in the bar, there were
only 18 cases in all of Shanghai that day — a city of 26 million people.
A few days after his bar outing, authorities called to confirm he’d been at the bar. The next
day, a caller from the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention alerted
him that authorities were on their way. Hale was about to be “taken away” — an expression
Chinese use when describing the phenomenon.
Next, a hotel staffer called to say he couldn’t leave, and that the hotel was in lockdown
due to his mere presence in it. Then came the men in hazmat suits, who escorted him down
a deserted hallway to a staff elevator and out through the cordoned-off hotel entrance. He was
directed to board a small bus driven by another man in a hazmat suit.
Hale joined the other condemned passengers — none of whom had actually tested positive.
His hopes that he’d be taken to a quarantine hotel were dashed. A drive of more than
an hour ended on a small road in the middle of a field, with several large buses queued
up ahead of his.
The driver got out, locked the bus behind him and wandered off. A fellow passenger was
surprised to hear that Hale was from the UK: “They brought you here? With a foreign
passport?” Hours of waiting on the increasingly chilly bus went by, until it finally moved
again at 2 am.
As he was trudging along to his assigned quarters, a fellow detainee pointed to three rows of
wire above the perimeter fences, beyond which were only tall trees.
Hale’s new home was a box similar to a shipping container, elevated by short stilts. His
and every door was monitored by a camera. There was no hot water.
“Inside my 196-sq-ft cabin there were two single beds, a kettle, an air-conditioning unit, a desk,
a chair, a bowl, two small cloths, one bar of soap, an unopened duvet, a small pillow, a
toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste and a roll-up mattress roughly the thickness of an oven
glove
The floor was covered in dust and grime. The whole place shook when you walked
around, which I soon stopped noticing. The window was barred, though you could still lean
out. There was no shower.
Like Hale, the camp staff were prohibited from leaving or receiving deliveries there.
A worker said he earned the equivalent of about $32 a day.
Hale tried to see if his status as a foreign journalist might spring him from detention.
The worker he approached with that question was baffled by the mere premise…but we can’t
blame Hale for trying.
1 comment:
Let it rain, let it rain.
Open the floodgates of Heaven
The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad
Let the distance shores rejoice
Clouds and thick darkness surround him
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne
A fire goes before him and consumes his foes on every side
His lightning lights up the world
The earth sees and trembles
The mountains melt like wax before the Lord
Before the Lord of all the earth
The Heavens proclaim His righteousness
And all peoples will see His Glory
We want to see Your Glory, God!
Do you want to see His Glory?
Lift your voices, lift your hands!
Let it rain, let it rain.
Open the floodgates of Heaven
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