A heartbreaking video from locked-down Shanghai shows an old man standing in front of a truck, almost as though it were a tank in Tiananmen Square back in 1989. But instead of standing up for liberty, he’s begging for food. More importantly, he wants the world to know what Communist China is doing to the 26 million people of Shanghai.
It’s been a long time since American parents scolded picky children to clean their plates because “there are children starving in China.”
But starvation is back. Because Communism.
There’s just so much wrong in this video (posted just below), starting with the fact that the tree-lined boulevard is almost bereft of traffic during daylight hours. There’s the old man, the truck, and very little else happening in the nearly two-minute clip.
Before the lockdown — now well into its second month — Shanghai was one of the busiest and richest cities in the world. Now it’s almost a ghost town, as I wrote in early April:
Shanghai, Communist China’s massive commercial and shipping hub, is effectively under martial law according to social media posts from residents of the locked-down city.
Beijing has been trying (and failing) to enforce a strict “zero COVID” regime, but exactly how soldiers and armored vehicles are supposed to fight a virus remains a mystery.
The city hit a record 13,000 positive COVID tests on April 4 — all of them asymptomatic.
Just days after the story went live, we started to learn just how bad the situation had gotten in Shanghai:
Record numbers of Shanghai residents have tested positive for COVID in recent weeks. To be clear, they’ve been forcibly tested by strongman Xi Jinping’s regime.
Virtually all of those testing positive are asymptomatic.
People outside China’s high-risk groups aren’t dying. They don’t even feel sick.
Nevertheless, the lockdown grinds on as Xi attempts the impossible with his zero COVID fever.
Some residents, broke and increasingly hungry, are making the last desperate act of defiance.
They’re throwing themselves out of their high-rise apartments.
That was nearly a month ago. The Shanghai lockdown has been in effect this entire time, with people unable to leave their homes even to buy groceries.
City residents have turned to (mostly) unhackable blockchain protection of “videos, photos and artworks [that capture] their ordeal as non-fungible tokens [NFT] to ensure they can be shared and avoid deletion” by Communist authorities.
Someday the history of all this pointless suffering will be revealed.
Thugs (known as “Big Whites“) in protective gear roam the streets, enforcing the lock-ins with beatings, erecting fences around residential buildings, and even killing pets.
The real reason for the ineffective (but brutal) lockdown remains a mystery.
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Is the CCP exercising its power just because it can? Does it represent some kind of internal power struggle? Does Chinese strongman Xi Jinping fear that if he backs off his “Chinese way” of fighting COVID that he’ll lose power?
Nobody outside of Beijing’s halls of power knows for sure, but the results can be seen in the tearful eyes of one starving old man.
Anyway, here’s the clip — and even with the language barrier, it isn’t easy to watch.
Heart-wrenching video of a worker in Shanghai, who stops a truck to expose his desperation and hunger. Man breaks down crying when given bananas and crackers pic.twitter.com/trNTM9vHzi
— Chuang (@chuangcn) May 3, 2022
According to the translation, at one point the old man says, “Shanghai people, not one person cares about us. Take care of us! Expose this! Help me expose this! I am a worker. I’m going to starve to death!”
You have to wonder how the old man got out of his apartment without a beating and orders to return from a gang of big whites.
You don’t want to wonder what might happen to the truck driver if Communist authorities uncover his identity.
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