BEIJING—China’s largest city of Shanghai is ordering mass testing Friday of all 1.3 million residents of its downtown Yangpu district and confining them to their homes at least until results are known.
The demand is an echo of measures ordered over the summer that led to a two-month lockdown of the entire city of 25 million that devastated its economy, prompting food shortages and rare confrontations between residents and the authorities.
At the start of the lockdown, authorities said it would last just days but then kept extending the deadline.
The Chinese regime has shown no sign of backing away from its hardline “zero-COVID” policy since a major congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded this week by awarding leader Xi Jinping a third five-year term in power and packed top bodies with his loyalists.
Strict measures have been imposed across the country, from Shanghai in the east to Tibet far to the west, where anti-lockdown protests have also been reported.
Cellphone video said to have been smuggled out of the region showed crowds of both native Tibetans and Han Chinese migrants milling in the streets of Lhasa to protest a lockdown that has lasted as long as 74 days. The video was reportedly shot on Wednesday. There was no sign of violence.
Lhasa has been under tight surveillance since bloody anti-CCP protests broke out in the city in 2008 before spreading across Tibetan areas.
Despite public anger, the former chairman of Shanghai’s Communist Party Committee, the city’s top official who was ultimately responsible for the lockdown measures, was given the No. 2 spot in the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee—an indication of Xi’s elevation of political loyalists above those capable of gaining public support through competent administration.
Li Qiang, who had been Xi’s virtual chief of staff when he headed the eastern province of Zhejiang, has been replaced by Beijing Mayor Chen Jining, a former president of Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and minister of environmental protection.
Chen, 58, was educated at Brunel University London and worked at Imperial College London, where he earned a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering in 1993.
Many Chinese had hoped for a relaxation of the strict anti-COVID-19 protocols, which remain in place even while much of the rest of the world has opened up. China’s borders remain largely closed and arrivals must undergo a 10-day quarantine at a designated place.
In a sign the CCP’s tough measures will be maintained in the long term, Shanghai plans to build a permanent quarantine center on an island in the Huangpu River that divides the financial hub, according to the business magazine Caixin.
The 1.6 billion yuan ($221 million) project on Fuxing Island will expand existing facilities to create 3,009 isolation rooms and 3,250 beds, with construction expected to be completed in six months, Caixin said.
China’s domestically developed vaccines are considered relatively ineffective and it has refused to approve foreign brands such as Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and J&J.
Still, the CCP wants more people to get booster shots before it relaxes its restrictions. As of mid-October, 90 percent of Chinese were fully vaccinated and 57 percent had received a booster shot.
In Tibet’s second-largest city of Shigatse, authorities announced that “normal living and production order” would resume on Friday.
Meanwhile, authorities on Wednesday ordered the lockdown of 900,000 people in Wuhan for at least five days. In remote Qinghai province, the urban districts of Xining city have been locked down since last Friday.
In Beijing, Universal Studios has closed its hotels and attractions “to comply with pandemic prevention and control.”
