China puts hard word on Big Tech

Call to keep eye on shared Covid protest information

The country is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention. Sun Chunlan

The Chinese government has ordered tech companies to hire more censors as its crackdown on protests over strict Covid rules intensifies.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, which sets rules governing internet use, yesterday issued guidance to tech giants including Tencent and TikTok owner Bytedance, telling them to pay closer attention to information being shared about protests, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Officials were also instructed to tell Chinese search engines to block searches for virtual private networks (VPNs), used to access banned sites such as Twitter, where people have shared protest footage and pictures.

Of particular interest to the censors were details of protests at Chinese universities, as well as online discussion of the fire that killed 10 people in the locked-down city of Urumqi, Xinjiang, last week.

The deadly blaze was a catalyst for clashes and protests across the country, which took aim at China’s draconian Covid laws.

In a sign Xi Jinping’s signature zero-Covid policy might be crumbling, quarantine and testing requirements will be eased in some cities.

Cities including Shanghai and Guangzhou have gradually begun to relax district lockdowns, allowing businesses to reopen, giving exemptions from daily tests, and letting some infected people, including pregnant mothers, to quarantine at home.

Home isolation for the infected is a significant change to China’s Covid rules. Earlier this year, communities were locked down for weeks at a time, sometimes after a single positive test.

The authorities will also launch a new drive to improve accessibility to vaccines and encourage the elderly and vulnerable to take the jab through targeted programmes in nursing homes and leisure facilities.

Protesters believe long-running Covid restrictions, which have not prevented national cases from rising, contributed to the deaths, which included multiple children.

The authorities have denied this, but Sun Chunlan, the Chinese vicepremier, signalled that the government might be caving to pressure, announcing on Wednesday that a “new situation” required “new tasks”.

Sun, a central figure in overseeing the pandemic response, told the National Health Commission that the Omicron variant’s ability to cause disease was weakening.

“The country is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens, more people are vaccinated and experience in containing the virus is accumulated,” she said, according to a Reuters report.

She made no mention of the zeroCovid policy in her latest remarks, suggesting a path may be opening up out of a strict approach to pandemic prevention that has disrupted the economy and daily life.

The message was backed up by state media, including the Global Times, which published an exclusive stating Chinese researchers had proven that the Omicron variant was less dangerous than earlier Covid strains.

Hu Xijin, the former Global Times editor who remains a high-profile proCommunist party commentator on social media, tweeted that the new policy meant “China was speeding up to cast aside large-scale lockdowns”.

As well as assuaging public fears about the danger posed by the virus, the authorities will have to contend with widespread hesitancy among key groups.

In the capital, Beijing, several districts announced that people who stayed at home and didn’t need to go to public places could opt out of daily nucleic acid tests, while multiple shopping centres said they would open their doors again.