From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   ‘At the Breaking Point’: Tibetans, Under Lockdown, Make Rare Cries for Help   
   By Vivian Wang, Sept. 16, 2022, NY Times   
      
   BEIJING — Infected patients quarantined alongside those who tested negative.   
   No food for hours, despite repeated requests. Lines of buses, loaded with   
   people, waiting late into the night to drop them off at makeshift isolation   
   centers.   
      
   These are the scenes described by residents of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet,   
   who have been locked down for one month as officials try to contain a   
   coronavirus outbreak.   
      
   Lockdowns, including of entire cities, have become almost commonplace in   
   China, which remains bent on eliminating the coronavirus even as the rest of   
   the world tries to live with it. But the recent calls for help out of Tibet,   
   as well as Xinjiang — two    
   border regions where the Chinese government has put in place highly repressive   
   controls — speak to how desperate conditions have become there, where many   
   residents are usually intimidated into keeping quiet.   
      
   Yet the incentive for the authorities to hold fast and silence discontent is   
   also stronger than usual. The Chinese Communist Party is slated to hold a   
   major political meeting next month, where its leader, Xi Jinping, is almost   
   certain to extend his    
   tenure. In the run-up, it is crucial for officials to ensure that the effort   
   to achieve “zero Covid,” which Mr. Xi has declared a personal priority,   
   appears smooth and successful.   
      
   The result is a vicious cycle. The authorities enact ever-harsher quarantine   
   and censorship rules. Those, in turn, create more hardships and    
   issatisfaction.   
      
   “The social media posts you see from people in Lhasa are all about   
   suffering, but that’s the real Lhasa. Lhasa’s public announcements, I feel   
   they’re all fake,” said a food delivery worker in the city who gave only   
   his surname, Min, for fear of    
   official retaliation.   
      
   The government has promoted positive videos of officials encouraging frontline   
   workers and promising ample supplies of food and medicine. But Mr. Min said he   
   was quarantined with five family members in an unfinished apartment building,   
   even though he had    
   not tested positive. Workers said he could be released if his latest test, on   
   Sept. 10, also came back negative — but it had been days with no word on a   
   result.   
      
   While he was waiting, officials had sent another man to join their family in   
   quarantine, because they were all of the Hui ethnic minority, Mr. Min said.   
   But the man said he had tested positive. Mr. Min said all he could do was wear   
   two masks and try to    
   keep a distance.   
      
   Restrictions are tightening across China. Last week, the central government   
   announced that the entire country, even areas without cases, would need to   
   mandate regular testing of all residents through October. Tens of millions of   
   people have been locked    
   down in recent weeks. The capital, Beijing, is on high alert, after several   
   dozen cases have been detected in recent days.   
      
   The lockdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang, though, stand out for having dragged on   
   for more than a month. Lhasa — home to nearly 900,000 people, about 70   
   percent of them ethnically Tibetan — began ordering certain areas to close   
   after discovering a handful    
   of infections on Aug. 8, with restrictions soon spreading citywide. Yining, a   
   city in the northwestern part of Xinjiang, has also been under restrictions   
   since early August.   
      
   The shutdowns gained relatively little attention at first, compared with those   
   in larger cities like Shanghai and Chengdu, whose lockdowns this year   
   dominated Chinese social media. But in recent days, as the controls have shown   
   no sign of easing,    
   residents have mounted an online campaign to draw attention to their plight.   
   Some have tagged state media outlets in hopes of attracting official coverage.   
   Others have attached unrelated trending hashtags, such as one about an actor   
   accused of hiring    
   prostitutes.   
      
   Perhaps most remarkably, the chorus of voices has also included ethnic   
   Tibetans — a group that can face intense repercussions for any criticism of   
   the government. Under Mr. Xi, the authorities in Tibet — a part of China   
   known officially as the    
   Tibetan Autonomous Region — have stepped up longstanding efforts to   
   assimilate ethnic Tibetans through resettlement programs, political   
   indoctrination and a crackdown on their language.   
      
   On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, some residents have shared videos in   
   Tibetan describing being unable to work or pay rent, according to translations   
   by Tibet Action Institute, an overseas activist group supporting Tibetan   
   independence. One man,    
   filming himself in a vehicle, said he had been sleeping in his car for a   
   month. A woman begged to be allowed to return to her village elsewhere in   
   Tibet, describing her worry about food running out.   
      
   Lhadon Tethong, the director of Tibet Action Institute, said she had been   
   stunned by what she called a flood of Tibetan voices this week, compared with   
   a trickle of information before.   
      
   “They’re these direct cries for help coming from inside in a way that we   
   just don’t see anymore,” she said. “So we know they’re at the breaking   
   point.”   
      
   Several of the videos have been deleted. In the video of the woman asking to   
   go home — no longer available online — she emphasized that she was not   
   protesting. On Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, a user whose post about   
   Lhasa’s lockdown was shared    
   more than 6,000 times later posted again thanking users for commenting on   
   government accounts to raise awareness but asked them to stop tagging her.   
   “The risks of speaking out are really very high,” she wrote. “I’m   
   panicking.”   
      
   The Lhasa authorities’ zero-tolerance approach has also swept up Han   
   Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnicity.   
      
   Wen Yan, 30, said she, her boyfriend and four roommates were ordered into   
   centralized quarantine on Monday, though their latest test results were   
   negative. They boarded an ambulance around 4 p.m. but were not dropped off at   
   the quarantine center —    
   another unfinished apartment complex — until after 7. In the apartment, the   
   bathroom was flooded.   
      
   They were not given any food; a worker said they had arrived too late, Ms. Wen   
   said. Around midnight, her boyfriend and another man confronted some workers   
   to demand food. They were beaten, she said, providing photos of their injuries.   
      
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)