One year after lockdown, Wuhan dissident more isolated than ever



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WUHAN, China (AP) – A year after the lockdown, Wuhan has long since come back to life – but Zhu Tao remains in a bunker in his 14th floor apartment, spending his days scrolling through the news, playing virtual football on his PlayStation and feel that China is teetering on the brink of collapse.

He spent thousands of dollars, his savings, hoarding jerky beef and chocolate bars, water bottles and bags of rice, masks, alcohol and disinfectant wipes, and a 900 solar panel. $.

Haunting Zhu is the fear of the virus coming back – that once again the government is covering up the truth and, once again, Wuhan falls under lockdown.

“I am able to eat and wait for death, to eat and wait for death,” Zhu said, with a buzzcut that he cut himself off, because he dared not venture into the house. hairdresser. “People like me may be in the minority, but I take it very seriously.”

Zhu, a 44-year-old foundry at the city’s state-owned steel plant, is well outside the mainstream in China. He is a staunch critic of the government, an intermittent protester, a supporter of the Hong Kong democratic movement.

He and others wishing to publicly disseminate such views are ridiculed, rejected or silenced. They are a minority in an increasingly authoritarian and prosperous China, where there is less tolerance for protests and less appetite to do so.

At the start of the Wuhan epidemic, which would later spread around the world and kill more than 2 million people, Zhu ignored reports from state media downplaying the virus and staying at home, a move that could have saved him, his wife and son from infection.

For a few fleeting months, as public anger erupted against the authorities who hid critical information about the coronavirus, Zhu felt his early warning was warranted, his deep mistrust of officials confirmed.

But as winter softened in spring and Wuhan’s lockdown was lifted, the mood changed. Now Wuhan’s wealthy kids are dropping expensive whiskey bottles and shattering electronics bop at the city’s posh nightclubs. Thousands of people crowd Jianghan Road, the city’s main shopping street.

Once considered prophetic, Zhu has now become an outcast, his anti-state sentiment increasingly at odds with government orthodoxy. He alienated his in-laws and neighbors and was detained, watched and censored.

Preparing for a new wave of infection, he wonders how it is possible that everyone around him continues his life as usual.

“This is the biggest historical event of the last century,” Zhu said. “But everyone has come back to their life, as before the epidemic. … How can they be so numb, so indifferent, as if they had barely experienced anything?

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Zhu grew up in the 1980s, a politically open era in China, when teachers sometimes broached concepts like democracy and free speech after the disastrous uproar of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

This suited Zhu, given his “very mean, very rebellious” nature and intellectual instincts, reflected in the way he pricked his tongue with literary references even though he had never been to college.

He was just a child during the Tiananmen protests in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of people came to Beijing’s central plaza to demand democratic rights. But in the years since the bloody military crackdown on protesters, he read more about it, becoming sympathetic even as others grew cynical, indifferent or even supportive of the Communist Party regime won over by growing prosperity. from China.

When Zhu first connected over ten years ago, he found that others shared his thinking. China had yet to develop the sophisticated internet police force that patrols the web today, and uncensored government information constantly exploded online.

The first controversy that caught Zhu’s attention was a tainted powdered milk scandal that killed six babies and sickened tens of thousands more. He joined focus groups and meetings and slowly crept into dissident circles.

After President Xi Jinping – China’s most authoritarian ruler in decades – came to power – Zhu’s views have caused him more and more trouble. In 2014, he was detained for a month after donning a black shirt and a white flower in a Wuhan square in remembrance of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, removing him from his teenage son.

But when a mysterious respiratory illness began to spread in Wuhan early last year, Zhu’s deep skepticism of the government suddenly became prescient. After seeing rumors about the disease in late December 2019, Zhu began to warn his friends and family. Many called him a stubborn fly, but his wife and son stayed at home, saving them from outings that would soon make their loved ones sick.

The first to fall ill was his wife’s aunt, who started coughing after an appointment with an ophthalmologist at a hospital where the virus was spreading. Then came his wife’s cousin, who had accompanied her to the same hospital. Then it was his neighbor’s mother.

Then came the lockdown, proclaimed without warning on January 23 at 2 a.m. Wuhan has fallen into the history books, the epicenter of the greatest quarantine in history. The virus ravaged the city of 11 million, flooding hospitals and killing thousands, including his wife’s aunt on January 24.

Zhu had a grim satisfaction at being right. He watched the explosion of public anger on social media, peaking in February with the death of Li Wenliang., a Wuhan doctor who was punished for warning others about the very disease that would take his life.

That night, Zhu was glued to his phone, browsing hundreds of messages decrying censorship. There were hashtags demanding freedom of speech. There was a quote from Li in a Chinese magazine shortly before his death: “A healthy society should not have one voice.”

Early the next morning, many messages had been purged by the censors. On the death certificate of his wife’s cousin, doctors wrote that she died of an ordinary lung infection, despite having tested positive for the coronavirus. This deepened Zhu’s suspicion that the cases were vastly underestimated.

“I was so angry it hurt,” he says. “I had nowhere to express my emotions. You wanna kill somebody, you’re so angry, you know?

The outbreak has strained Zhu’s relationships. Her neighbor, a childhood friend, got into an argument with Zhu after doctors told the neighbor’s mother that she just had a regular lung infection.

“I questioned him. “How can you be sure that what the hospital told you was the truth?” Zhu recalls. “I said you always have to be careful.”

A week later, his friend’s mother passed away. On his death certificate, the coronavirus was cited as the cause. They quarreled on the day of his death, with Zhu’s friend accusing him of cursing his mother. The two have not spoken to each other since.

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In April, the lockdown was lifted after 76 days. But as others returned to work, Zhu requested a one-year medical leave and locked himself. His quarantine lasted almost 400 days and this is no longer the case.

He refused to go to his cousin and aunt’s funeral that summer, even though there were no more new cases in Wuhan. Her angry in-laws cut off the ignition.

Pockets of like-minded people still dot China, from renegade intellectuals in Beijing to a punk cafe in Inner Mongolia where posters and stickers say “avoidable and controllable” – quietly mocking the standard phrase used by officials to minimize the virus.

In Wuhan, dissident circles gather on crypto chats to exchange intelligence. At small gatherings over tea, they complain about inconsistencies in the party line with a hint of pride, saying they fled the virus by not trusting the government.

But under the watchful eyes of state cameras and censors, there is little room to organize or connect. Before the anniversary of the lockdown this year, police chased at least one dissident out of Wuhan. He was bei luyou, or “tourist,” the playful phrase used by activists to describe how police take troublemakers on involuntary vacations at sensitive times.

In his self-quarantine, Zhu found solace in the literature. He was drawn to Soviet writers who made fun of Moscow’s vast propaganda apparatus. He is also convinced that the virus could spread widely, even though the official number of cases in China is now much lower than in most other countries.

“They’ve been lying for so long,” Zhu said, “for so long that even if they started telling me the truth, I won’t believe it.

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Associated Press video reporter Emily Wang and photographer Ng Han Guan contributed to this report.

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