First, Wuhan: this is the city where COVID started. After three years of very harsh and restrictive COVID policies, people came to major streets on their own to welcome the brand new year.
A county in Henan: Zhoukou: someone set off firework and lots of people came for a gathering, the police also came and some people were arrested.
The next day, people came back to Zhoukou and set off more fireworks and the police came and arrested people again. But this time, people demanded the release, they turned over the police car. It seems that the police has lost public respect. Eventually, armed police came and arrested two.
In Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan, people also celebrated the New year with fireworks. Since the city has a ban on firework, the police was trying to stop people with fire extinguishers. This city have suffered a lot in recently years. The local bank freeze on depositors is still damaging people’s livelihood (See newsletter 79). Some depositors went to Zhengzhou to protest on Jan 1st. Some of them have been beaten and some of them are unreachable. Others tried to talk to reporters inside China. But the reporters declined to talk to them.
Shijiazhuang, a city that is about 3 hours ride from Beijing, was probably the first city to abandon COVID-zero policy due to a COVID outbreak. Huge crowd comes out on New Year Eve.
In recent years, Xi has managed to use the social credit system, mass surveillance, people’s children and relatives as collateral to punish anyone who dares to break the law, so such public display of defiance against the law has been extremely rare. The fireworks is often done by young people, some even are doing it while driving fancy cars. The rich young kids are normally very eager to defend the government, hence they are famously labelled as “little pink”. Perhaps the COVID-zero policy have really pissed them off?
Paxlovid is so far the best medicine available for COVID patients over 65 year old. Slowly, well-informed Chinese people (in the cities) learn of this medicine. Demand is huge. But it is extremely hard to find it in China. Information is very chaotic. Some scammers sell fake Indian generic Paxlovid online. News report claimed that the Chinese government only imported 40,000 packs of the medicine in 2022. FT reported:
“China’s elites are stockpiling supplies of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s COVID-19 antiviral drug, and giving it away to curry favour with business associates as an unprecedented COVID wave sweeps the country, leaving hospitals stripped of resources.”
In big cities, bodies are piling up in the hospitals and funeral homes. Report about the countryside is very rare. One online media on Wechat had visited 10 villages in China, and they found out, the villages have lots of old people, but very limited medical resources and little medicine. People don’t know the name of COVID, they call it “that disease”. COVID is just arriving there, many patients think it is just a cold, there is no fever medicine, they mostly rely on herbs to deal with the symptoms. This is a very scary situation.
With death toll rising at the funeral homes (but not on official statistics), people seem to have lost trust in CCP. One very visible example is Hu Xijin. On Weibo, people saw him replying to someone arguing against him, saying: “You don’t need to argue against me, you should argue against the government, it is their decision.”
Many people laughed that finally there is some government decision that even Hu Xijin can not defend. Hu has a very popular nickname: the dog who catch the flying disc. Every time the government does something (throwing a flying disc), Hu will find justification for it (catch the disc). But this time, he failed.
Other people on Twitter speak of personal experience of their patriotic elderlies:
This morning my mom made video calls with our pink elderlies, they suddenly started accusing the government of ignoring people’s lives. We learned that one of our relatives lost his father to COVID in the morning of Dec 31st. A group of relatives begged many funeral homes and bribed with money and finally the body can be cremated in three weeks.
This year Chinese New Year will be on 22 January and will be the year of the rabbit