On May 10th, a phone conversation between a woman who claimed to be from Chinese CDC and two young American women was circulating on Chinese internet. You can listen to the 5 minutes conversation here on Youtube.
The young American women were not only articulate and argued very well for their own cases, they also argued for their (Chinese) neighbours to stay in the apartments. One of them was very calm and reasonable, the other was frank and angry, but with good argument. At the end, the CDC woman did not know what to say and she pretended that the telephone line was disrupted and hung up.
What made this conversation viral was that the American women cared about their Chinese neighbours. As we showed in our last newsletter, since Chinese people have been forced to care only about themselves, they are very moved by the American women.
On May 11th, another short video (about 1:36 minutes) came out, you can watch it here on twitter to see the situation.
In the video, a group of people in white uniform (nicknamed Big Whites) came to drag a young man and his wife to be quarantined. The young man also argued that according to the policy they did not have to leave their home. Big whites started threatening him. He argued back that the police have no power to force him to leave his home.
The police said: just wait, you will be punished administratively and three generations of your offspring will be affected by this punishment.
If you are not Chinese, you must wonder how this could have happened.
Well, every Chinese citizen has a file called Dangan, stored somewhere. Every time you want to do something, like going to university, the authority will consult your Dangan. It happened during the cultural revolution, people could not go to university or go to have good jobs, if they came from a “wrong” family. This family background is recorded in Dangan. After the cultural revolution, Dangan is still looming over people’s lives, but it lost its significance over time. Lately, social credit system is popping up, and perhaps it will become the digital Dangan for the future.
To this threat from the police, the young man declared: “We are the last generation, thank you!”
“We are the last generation” spread quickly among Chinese netizens. If you know anything about the declining births in China and how much the government worries about it, you will understand that this declaration is a form of rebellion.
To make it clear, someone posted a short video clip on twitter. It is a one minute stand up comedy by Dayo Wong. He said: “If everyone of us are willing to refuse to have kids, the tyranny will be ended. As long as the government mistreats me, I will refuse to have kids. With time, there will be less and less people for them to rule over. You mistreat me, I will just die faster. Every death means one less person for you.”
This clip is from a show he made in 1997, right before Hong Kong’s return to China.
On May 11th, [Lu Yuyu tweeted] that someone in his building was tested positive so everyone has to be transferred to quarantine. The police came three times to threaten him to go along with quarantine. He took video each time and posted them on YouTube. He also argued against the police on forced quarantine very strongly. But at the end of the third video, his phone was taken by the police. Later Lu explained on twitter that there were too many police so he was dragged out of his apartment. They agreed that the manager of the residential area will come to visit the cat everyday.
Lu was driven to a Fang Cang like quarantine centre with two families. The two families checked in before him. He saw that the families were begging to stay together but were rejected. When it was his turn, he said he would rather die than staying in the centre. Eventually they sent him to a hotel. Lu said, this is not a victory, he just wanted to be treated as a human being.
If you want to have a big picture on what is happening in China, I recommend you listen to this NPR interview recorded on May 10th 2022.