What Shanghai Is Going Through Is News to Many in the Rest of China

If viewed through the lens of state media, Shanghai authorities are delivering food packages and ensuring everyone’s well-being with few glitches. There is little in authorities’ statements to signal a crisis. Official narratives have framed Shanghai residents’ resilience and resourcefulness in securing essentials—often through grassroots efforts like group-buying and bartering—as examples of positive energy.

Much of the venting from Shanghai residents frustrated by weeks of hardship is scrubbed from social media. For example, late Friday in China, a six-minute video clip showing an empty Shanghai, overlaid with what appeared to be a dozen audio recordings of residents, briefly went viral on Chinese social media. It seemed to sum up the sense of despair and anger many in Shanghai say they have felt during the citywide lockdown, which is entering its fourth week.

In one recording dated early April, a woman’s voice was heard saying, “All the wards at hospitals are very strained, no rooms available at quarantine centers.” Another woman thanked community volunteers for their help. There were also short clips of people shouting, “We need supplies.” A man’s voice said, “Today I feel that Covid may not kill people, but people can die from starvation.”

Around midnight, searches for the video’s title, “Voices of April,” yielded no results on the Twitter-like platform Weibo.

Many of the grievances and calls for help from Shanghai residents have also circulated on WeChat, which is owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and has more than 1 billion users. However, any information shared there is highly dependent on a user’s social circle—which leaves many outside Shanghai without a clue about the situation there.

A teacher in Hangzhou, about 100 miles from Shanghai, who identified herself by her last name, Wang, said that when her friends in Shanghai posted their panic about food shortages on social media she bought a freezer and stocked up on food in case her city was hit with similar lockdown measures. But when she urged her parents, who live in the same city, to do the same, they weren’t receptive.

“They have no idea what people in Shanghai are going through,” Ms. Wang said, adding that her parents, who are in their 80s, consume mostly nationalistic content on WeChat.

“On WeChat, the kind of information you get depends on your choices of friends, the chat groups you are in and the public accounts you follow,” said Kecheng Fang, who teaches journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and studies online discourse in China. He said in the absence of credible news sources, he has been relying on friends who live in Shanghai for firsthand information.

Censorship and media controls mean the likelihood is low that people with no personal connection to anyone in Shanghai will have a grasp of the situation there, said Guobin Yang, a professor of communication and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Recently, some WeChat groups have passed around notices from authorities banning discussions of Shanghai that contain “negative and sensitive information.”

The number of daily Covid-19 cases reported by Shanghai health authorities, which had stayed below 20,000 for much of the week, rebounded back to 23,370 on Friday, with 12 new deaths. Shanghai has reported a total of 48 deaths during the current outbreak. City officials have outlined plans for aggressive Covid-containment measures to continue, including more rounds of mass testing and the addition of more quarantine beds.

“Shanghai had always been seen as an outlier for its flexible Covid policy, effective governance and economic might, and so people have a hard time believing Shanghai would go through the same restrictions as the rest of China did,” said Wendy Zhou, a researcher in a doctoral program at Georgia State University who focuses on public discourse in China.

Claire Li, a high-school teacher in the western Chinese city of Xi’an, said that during her city’s monthlong lockdown which ended in January, she looked at Shanghai with envy. While Xi’an’s 13 million residents were housebound, Shanghai practiced more targeted measures, in one case locking down a milk tea shop where infections were found but not the surrounding buildings. “I was so jealous,” she says.

Now, she said she has little sense of what’s happening in Shanghai.

“I feel like there’s this invisible hand trying to show me only what it wants me to see,” Ms. Li said. As she sees social-media complaints about the difficulty in finding food in Shanghai, she says, “I don’t know what information to trust.”

State media outlets give little sense of residents struggling. A news segment aired over the past week on the national evening news broadcast by China Central Television, the state broadcaster, showed shoppers in Shanghai grocery stores abundant with produce. On social media, many pointed out that shelves seen in the background were largely empty. In a local Shanghai TV news clip, web users noticed what appeared to be the same woman shopping in multiple locations, leading to questions of whether she was a local official acting the part of an average consumer.

Responding to allegations that the CCTV segment was staged, Shanghai authorities said that the grocery store scenes were filmed in a suburban area far from Shanghai’s city center. Local media in Shanghai also interviewed the woman shopper, who said she wasn’t hired to act and wasn’t a neighborhood official.

In the wee hours of Saturday morning in China, the “Voices of April” clip continued to circulate on WeChat, where users reposted it to their personal feeds. In an apparent effort to evade censors, some turned the frame upside down, saved the clip onto other Chinese apps and shared the links on WeChat. By 2 a.m. in China, the video had been minted as a nonfungible token, or NFT, which suggests that—at least in theory—it will be permanently preserved.

By midmorning, Saturday in China, most traces of the video clip had disappeared from the Chinese internet.