Day: February 21, 2022

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in Beijing has told Hong Kong it must get the current current COVID-19 outbreak under control within the next two months, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the city’s handover to Chinese rule on July 1, according to a CCP-adjacent commentator.

Lu Wenduan, vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, which is part of the CCP’s United Front Work Department, said in a commentary in Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper that CCP leader Xi Jinping wants a zero-COVID outcome by the time the celebrations begin.

Judging from recent comments from Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office under China’s cabinet, the State Council, Xi doesn’t want incumbent Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam to serve another term in office if she can’t achieve that goal.

“As long as the epidemic is controlled within the next two months, Hong Kong can have a normal and successful election for chief executive,” Lu wrote.

Ivan Choy, senior politics lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), said the 25th anniversary of the handover is a landmark date for Beijing, and comes two years after the CCP imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong, rewrote the city’s electoral rules to ensure opposition voices were excluded, forced the closure of pro-democracy media outlets and arrested dozens of former lawmakers and opposition activists for “subversion.”

“They have put so much effort into bringing in the national security law and on ‘improving’ the electoral system, that it will be hard to justify if Hong Kong is even less stable than it was before,” Choy told RFA.

“So they want to ensure Hong Kong is stable … as well as offering some kind of justification to the outside world on the 25th anniversary,” he said.

Hong Kong current affairs commentator Johnny Lau said it will be hard for the CCP to claim that Hong Kong is a united city under the new regime if it is still reeling from the current wave of COVID-19 infections, which has filled up the city’s public hospitals and prompted calls from pro-Beijing commentators for mass, compulsory testing aided by supplies and experts from mainland China.

But Beijing is still willing to allow some quarter to Hong Kong officials, rather than firing them for failing to achieve zero-COVID as has happened in mainland Chinese cities.

“The way China’s political culture works, they won’t want to focus on the way certain officials have handled the crisis at the expense of focusing on external forces,” Lau said, in a reference to Beijing’s blaming of the 2019 protest movement on infiltration by “hostile foreign forces.”

“The more these two ideas are kept separate, the better,” he said. “It’s not really a question of official accountability in Hong Kong.”

No triage system

Hong Kong on Monday reported a further 7,533 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including the death of an 11-month-old baby.

According to the Hospital Authority, its public hospitals are currently at 89 percent on average, with an occupancy rate of 109 percent at the Caritas Hospital, 102 percent at Tseung Kwan O Hospital and 100 percent occupancy rate at two other public hospitals.

While many of the outdoor holding areas, where patients were left waiting for hours in parking lots under emergency blankets pending test results or triage, have now disappeared, some outdoor lines were still being photographed on Monday.

Hospital Authority Employees Alliance chairman David Chan said hospitals remain short-staffed, and many lack an effective triage system for COVID-19 patients.

“There are many members of the general public who don’t know how to tell if they have mild or severe illness, and there isn’t enough information about that,” Chan told RFA. “They are saying that people with mild illness can stay home, but a lot of people don’t know this.”

“Some people just go straight to hospital for treatment the moment they get a positive test result.”

But he said the 1,000 or so place available at private clinics were nowhere near enough to meet demand for outpatient appointments.

There is also a growing issue with nosocomial infections — those acquired in hospital — according to Edmund Lam, a family doctor who serves on the Scientific Committee on Vaccine Preventable Diseases.

“If private hospitals are able to provide negative pressure wards or better air circulation, for example, in outpatient clinics where patients don’t need to get admitted to hospital, then there will be a reduction in emergency room infections and community transmissions,” he said.

Postponing non-urgent surgeries

Ho Siu-wai, chairman of the Federation of Private Hospitals, said private hospitals are postponing non-urgent surgeries and using their resources to see COVID-19 patients instead.

The Hong Kong government has reopened the AsiaWorld-Expo venue as a community treatment facility, providing about 1,000 beds, while commissioning the China State Construction Group to build a total of 10,000 beds in community isolation and treatment facilities in Penny’s Bay and on the former Kai Tak airport site to receive patients with mild or asymptomatic infections.

Lam announced on Saturday that she will also requisition newly completed public housing, rent hotels and renovate public leisure and sports facilities, to yield a further 20,000 beds and isolation facilities.

Quarantine facilities are already running at around 4,400 hotel rooms in the Dorsett Tsuen Wan, iclub Ma Tau Wai Hotel, iclub Fortress Hill Hotel and Regal Oriental hotels, with a further 20,000 hotel rooms likely to become available for community quarantine measures at a later date.

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam on Friday announced the postponement of elections for the city’s top job after Xi told her government to throw all of its resources at pursuing a “zero-COVID” strategy, as a wave of the omicron variant of COVID-19 infections started to take its toll.

Nominations had been slated to begin on Feb. 20 for the March 27 election, which has now been postponed to May 8, to enable her administration to “focus on the epidemic,” Lam said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu have deployed county-level militia to seal off the home village of a trafficked woman found chained by the neck in an outbuilding and called in dozens of people for questioning over the leakage of documents linked to her story, sources told RFA.

More than 100 people in Jiangsu and Anhui have been called in for questioning by police in connection with the public leaking of information linked to the case of a chained woman in  while county-level armed militia forces have been deployed in large numbers to Feng county.

Jiangsu current affairs commentator Jiang Ziyang said the move is part of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s insistence on “stability maintenance” ahead of the annual parliamentary sessions in Beijing in early March.

“The government probably won’t deal with a lot of this now, because they will be sending in the militia in large numbers for the sake of stability maintenance,” Jiang said. “The county-level militia will take over from here, so it’s effectively a form of military control.”

“I don’t think the investigation by the provincial level authorities that people were hoping for is going to happen now,” he said.

Authorities in have Feng county detained three people including the husband of Yang Qingxia, who is surnamed Dong, amid an official investigation, but online comments increasingly pointed out contradictions in their statements about the woman’s identity and raised further questions about the involvement of local officials.

The Jiangsu provincial government announced last week it was taking over the investigation, which has sparked massive public anger and online debate about rampant trafficking in women and girls for forced marriage, particularly in the region around Feng county.

Jiang said government censors are currently making sure that very little information about the Feng county case or about the trafficking of women and girls makes it onto social media.

“It’s very difficult to send anything now,” Jiang said. “A while back, we were writing so many posts, but now, we can’t post anything, which is very scary.”

Meanwhile, a social media user nicknamed @I can carry 120 pounds said she was still traumatized after being detained by police in Pei county, which neighbors Feng county, after traveling there to try to help Yang.

“Extreme fear meant that my whole-body defenses were unconsciously switched on … it was like a sword piercing through me,” she wrote after returning home.

She described the experience as prompting “the collapse of my entire world view, of everything I had always trusted, into lies.”

Roads blocked

Online posts said roads in and out of Feng county are being blocked by police and militia.

Repeated calls to the Feng county police department ended in a busy tone or rang unanswered during office hours on Monday.

An official who answered the phone at the Xuzhou city police department referred RFA to a social media account linked to the Xuzhou police department, where updates would be posted when released.

“I don’t know when. Just follow that account, OK?” the official said.

A media worker who declined to be named said all news about the Feng county case is now subject to strict controls by the CCP’s propaganda department, with publications ordered to use only centrally approved text, and to regard anything else as “rumor.”

Activists all over the country have been receiving calls from censors ordering them to delete posts, photos and video relating to the story, the media worker said.

A Jiangsu resident surnamed Ling said the case is indicative of rampant human rights abuses in China.

“The case of the chained woman is by no means an isolated one,” Ling said. “We often hear about human trafficking, missing children and begging on the streets.”

“The official announcements … have been full of holes, and the public have completely lost confidence in the government,” he said.

Systemic issues

U.S.-based activist Yang Zili said the issues exposed by the Feng county case are systemic.

“The systemic problem in China is not only the lack of democracy and freedom of the press, but also legal issues,” he said. “There is such a crime as abduction and trafficking in women, but it’s a bit of a cover-up for far more serious offenses that include illegal detention, rape, abuse, assault and humiliation.”

“Clearly the local government has been implicated from the very start … they are a part of this organized crime racket,” he said. “Obvious crimes like human trafficking can’t exist for long without the protective umbrella of the government.”

Former 1989 pro-democracy protest leader Lü Jinghua said the central government may still be divided about how to handle the incident, as it came amid the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“I don’t think the central government has reached a consensus on the issue … while the Jiangsu provincial government or the municipal authorities in Xuzhou must be under much more pressure, and is taking a number of actions relating to propaganda, such as talking about thorough investigations,” Lü said.

Lü said authorities seem to have turned a blind eye to trafficking, and when they did bother to notice, it was too little, too late.

A bookstore in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou draped a chain over a display of feminist books on Monday, in protest at the status of women, after a mentally ill woman was found chained by the neck in an outhouse in Feng county, Jiangsu.

A viral video of a woman identified on her marriage certificate as Yang Qingxia has sparked mass public anger on Chinese social media, prompting a crackdown on well-wishers and rights activists who have spoken out against rampant trafficking of girls and women in rural China, and those who traveled to her village in Feng county in a bid to help her.

The display was titled “Books you should read about Feng county,” according to photos posted to social media and confirmed by Reuters, and including “Men Explain Things to Me” by Rebecca Solnit and “Masculine Domination” by Pierre Bourdieu.

However, the display was later removed due to its “controversial” nature, Reuters reported.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.