China Launches Social Media Purge to Silence Shanghai Lockdown Critics — Claims ‘False Information’

The Chinese Communist Party’s public security department recently pursued criminal charges against “25 rumormongers and imposed administrative penalties on 48 others” for promoting allegedly false accounts online about the Party’s anti-epidemic measures during Shanghai’s ongoing Chinese coronavirus lockdown, the state-run Global Times reported on Wednesday.

Local Communist Party authorities in Shanghai said on May 17 that they had identified 46 people who allegedly “first released the false information” and have “punished” them in accordance with Chinese law along with two other people who presumably shared the information.

Users of Chinese social media platforms, such as WeChat, alleged online that Communist Party officials in Shanghai overstepped their authority in several instances over the past month as they attempted to carry out the central government’s extreme “zero tolerance” policy toward the city’s Chinese coronavirus epidemic. As Chinese Internet users shone a spotlight on their alleged missteps, Communist Party authorities grimaced and subsequently launched a crackdown on the activity.

The Global Times detailed a handful of the allegations that apparently landed some Chinese “netizens,” i.e. Internet users, in hot water with the Communist Party in recent weeks, writing:

After receiving reports from netizens and verifying, rumors circulating on social media saying ‘passports and French residence cards were confiscated at the airport’, ‘the dismissal of an official in Huangpu district is related to his agreement with the nucleic acid review of residents’, and ‘the entire country’s Jingdong express delivery to Shanghai has been suspended’ are all false information, local authorities noted.

The Communist Party first launched an investigation into the troubling online chatter on April 8, three days after all of Shanghai’s 25 million-plus residents were forced to observe stay-at-home orders in an attempt to contain the city’s latest epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus. The total lockdown of Shanghai remained in place for the 43rd consecutive day on May 18, though municipal officials have said they plan to start easing the movement restriction on June 1.

Shanghai’s ongoing outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus, though allegedly waning, is evocative of a nationwide resurgence of the disease across China. Millions of Beijing’s residents have found themselves bound by various degrees of movement restrictions since at least April 28, when the Associated Press reported that “residents of two housing compounds in Beijing’s Chaoyang district were ordered to stay inside and some clinics and businesses shut down.”

The “zero tolerance” policy toward Chinese coronavirus outbreaks observed by China’s ruling Communist Party has seen Party officials seal off residential compounds from the outside without notice in both Shanghai and Beijing over the past month.