Xi Jinping heads to the beach as Shanghai suffers in Covid lockdown

As Covid chaos has broken out on the mainland, the Chinese President has flown to a resort island off China’s south coast.

There are no lockdown troubles for Chinese President Xi Jinping, the only leader in the world still championing a “Covid zero” policy.

As chaos has broken out on the mainland, Xi has flown to Hainan, a tropical island off China’s south coast.

To go by the happy snaps of Xi pointing at things and giving lectures on rural development, the trip has been a great success.

If only his subjects on the mainland could escape for a mini-break by the beach. Three years into the pandemic, China’s Covid restrictions are more drastic than ever.

Shanghai’s 26 million people – a population greater than Australia – is now three weeks into the most severe lockdown imposed in the world since Wuhan’s two years ago.

This is no Melbourne-style lockdown.

In Shanghai, neighbourhood committees have put locks and bicycle chains onto people’s front doors to confine them in their homes. Everybody who tests positive for Covid is being taken to often ramshackle quarantine stations – some little more than an empty factory warehouse. Babies have been separated from anguished parents. Pet dogs of the infected have been clubbed to death.

Food shortages have erupted into mini-riots as the city’s delivery network has been halted. People are dying because they can’t get basic care for non-coronavirus illnesses.

“The tragedy could have been avoided,” wrote Lang Xianping, a popular economist and TV presenter, in a post on social media about the death of his 98-year-old mother.

Lang’s mother needed an injection for a kidney problem. She died waiting outside a hospital emergency room, untreated. She hadn’t been able to present a negative Covid test.

His fame drew attention to the tremendous human cost of China’s Covid elimination policy. “This is the case for the upper class. Think about how desperate and helpless ordinary people would be when they encounter such a thing?” said one popular comment after Lang’s post.

Beijing insists now is not the time for a change of policy. Chinese health officials say the country’s huge elderly population and fragile healthcare system could not withstand a bigger outbreak.

Xi in Hainan. Picture: Guancha

The restrictions keep getting wider. University students and many of their teachers have been confined to their campuses around the country.

“I’ve been working more than 20 days without going home,” a professor at a university in Hebei told The Australian.

He can’t see his family. He sleeps on a makeshift bed in his office. He’s reluctant to complain.

It is the same on campuses, factories and other big workplaces around China.

“I only want to have one hour back home to see my family and get a change of clothes,” says the Hebei professor.

Stories like his aren’t reported in China’s stifled media.

Beijing has ordered them to tell “positive” news.

Officials in Shanghai have followed diligently. Their work is being overseen by the city’s new propaganda chief Zhao Jiaming, a graduate of Pyongyang’s Kim II-sung University and former deputy editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily.

A Shanghai station Dragon TV on Tuesday night announced that it was going to broadcast an “anti-epidemic party” with some of China’s biggest stars to celebrate the city’s efforts.

Shanghainese reacted with disbelief, then fury.

Chinese propaganda workers in Shanghai filming a story about serving the people vegetables.

Hours later, Dragon said the show had been suspended indefinitely, following the public’s “valuable comments”.

For its part, Xi’s office continues as if the crisis isn’t happening.

Last Friday, video of people in Shanghai screaming for food from their apartment balconies ricocheted around the Chinese internet. Seemingly unperturbed, Xi held a ceremony in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to toast the success of the Winter Olympics.

The only mention of the pandemic was one of self-congratulation. “If there were a gold medal for responding to the pandemic, then China would deserve it,” he said.

The curated crowd applauded.

What else could they do?