A provincial-level official of the Chinese communist regime publicly says extreme measures in pandemic control will be used for the upcoming Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th National Congress on Oct. 16.
During China’s National Day (Oct. 1) week-long holiday, authorities in Inner Mongolia region, home to a Mongol ethnicity in Northern China, adjacent to Beijing, ordered the lockdown of a county and a city because of single COVID-19 case reports. At the pandemic control leadership meeting, Sun Shaocheng, the CCP party secretary of Inner Mongolia, said that to prevent the spread and spillover of the epidemic to Beijing, the authorities must use extreme control measures in a manner of “killing a chicken with a butcher’s knife that is used to slaughter a bull” (Chinese proverb, equivalent to using a sledgehammer to kill a fly).
On Oct. 2, after a COVID-19 case was reported in Linxi County of Inner Mongolia, officials announced that the whole county was locked down.
Meanwhile, a positive case was also reported in Manzhouli, a major City in Inner Mongolia. The officials immediately announced that from Oct. 2 to 5, the city would be under “silent management,” a term the regime has used to indicate a full lockdown.
Mr. Chen, an online writer from mainland China, told The Epoch Times on Oct. 2, that the symptoms of COVID-19 Omicron variant are milder than that of a cold, “In Europe and the United States, they have announced that the pandemic is over, but China [the CCP] is still implementing control. This is because officials are messing around for political needs to please the higher-ups and for being politically correct. They don’t listen to the epidemic experts on epidemic prevention and control, so it has become very absurd.”
Chen, who declined to give a first name, due to fear of reprisal, also said, “The central government’s decision is wrong, and making the people miserable. And because the Chinese (CCP) bureaucracy is completely servile, the lower-level officials, in order to meet the needs of the higher levels, take the absurd orders and measures to the next level, and keep expanding the scale of it.”
Mr. Feng from Hubei, who declined to give his full name due to fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times that extreme epidemic prevention has seriously affected China’s economy, causing unemployment of young people. “I have never seen so many young people returning home, and all the migrant workers have returned, as they can’t find a job. Now, they have nothing to do in their hometown, and go fishing instead.”
Feng added that petitioners who go to Beijing to petition for their grievances are now under stricter control, as the CCP National Congress will be held soon. “All of them are under guard, some are sent to mental hospitals and locked up, some are sent to detention centers, and some are kept at home in the name of COVID-19 quarantine.”
People were ordered to stand inside circles drawn on the ground for “COVID-19 quarantine” on a road in China in 2022. (Online/Screenshot via the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times)
The mainland’s extreme zero-COVID policy has also caused all kinds of strange epidemic prevention phenomena. Recently, a video went viral on Chinese social media that showed people on a road in a mountainous area, being isolated on the spot by circles drawn on the ground.
Feng said that he saw the video and reposted it, “We have all kinds of weird things happening here for COVID-19 control, it’s not uncommon, there are too many of them.”
Luo Ya contributed to this report.
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