China's weekly road logistics price index up

China's road logistics price index went up last week, industrial data showed.

The index stood at 1,026.76 points in the week ending on May 6, up 1.3 percent from the previous week, according to a survey jointly conducted by the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing and the Guangdong Lin'an Logistics Group.

The demand for road logistics slightly decreased in the period, while the supply of transport capacity also dropped mildly, according to the federation. It predicted that the index might see a slight fall in the future.

From quoting the national anthem to referencing Hollywood blockbusters and George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984", Chinese web users are using creative methods to dodge censorship and voice discontent over Covid measures.

China maintains a tight grip over the internet, with legions of censors scrubbing out posts that cast the Communist Party's policies in a negative light.

The censorship machine is now in overdrive to defend Beijing's stringent zero-Covid policy as the business hub of Shanghai endures weeks of lockdown to tackle an outbreak.

Stuck at home, many of the city's 25 million residents have taken to social media to vent fury over food shortages and spartan quarantine conditions.

Charlie Smith, cofounder of censorship monitoring website GreatFire.org, said the Shanghai lockdown had become "too big of an issue to be able to completely censor". Hell-bent on getting their messages out, wily web users were turning to tricks such as flipping images and using wordplay, he said, using a pseudonym due to the sensitivity of his work.

In one example, censors deleted a popular hashtag on the Weibo social media platform quoting the first line of China's national anthem: "Arise, those who refuse to be slaves." The line was being shared alongside a torrent of anti-lockdown fury.

Others hijacked a hashtag about American human rights failings to make tongue-in-cheek barbs about home confinement in China.

In a similar attempt, netizens rallied to push Orwell's fiction "1984" to the top of a list of popular titles on the Douban ratings site, before it was blocked.

Censors also raced to kill off a menagerie of memes and hashtags based on a government official who previously said foreign journalists were "secretly loving" the fact they had safely seen out the pandemic in China.

Users then devised a series of oblique puns on that quote, eventually prompting censors to block the hashtag "La La Land".

Last month the internet police floundered in quashing viral video "Voices of April" that featured stories from distressed Shanghai residents in lockdown.

Web users rapidly re-edited and shared the six-minute

clip to outrun largely automated screening software, which struggled for hours to identify the different versions.

One frustrated Shanghai local said netizens shared the various formats "to make a point" even though each post vanished within minutes.

"It was us against the AI," the resident told AFP, requesting anonymity. People in Shanghai have become more "willing to pay the price" for airing critical views, said Luwei Rose Luqiu, an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.