Online Content Relating To Covid Censored In China As People Reflect On New Year's Eve

BEIJING: China's stringent zero-Covid policy, which the nation upheld for over three years, sparked a flood of online reflection on New Year's Eve, some of it negative. This month, China abandoned its strategy for eradicating all Covid-19 infections, which included repeated mass testing, centralised confinement for sick individuals, and lockdowns.

A wave of infections across the nation, a decline in economic activity, and international concern have all been brought on by the sudden decision to live with the virus. Britain and France are the most recent nations to place restrictions on foreign travellers from China.

On China's Twitter-like Weibo on Saturday, hundreds of users criticised the removal of a popular film created by local site Netease News that collected real-life stories from 2022 that had enthralled the Chinese populace.

Numerous of the stories in the video—which, as of Saturday, could no longer be viewed or shared on domestic social media platforms—illustrated the challenges that common Chinese people encountered as a result of the stringent zero-Covid regulation.

Before the video vanished from sites on Saturday at midday, one Weibo hashtag about it received roughly 4 million views. New hashtags were generated by social media users to keep the comments coming in. One person said, attaching a screenshot of a blank page that appears when searching for the hashtags, "What a perverse world, you can only extol the praises of the fake, but you cannot exhibit real life."

Many believe the removal of the videos and hashtags to be a kind of censorship, and it implies that the Chinese government still views the discourse surrounding the sickness as being politically sensitive. Numerous Weibo users bemoaned how the illness wave had spoiled any hope of a joyous mood on New Year's Eve.

The zero-Covid policy was abandoned despite the health authorities citing a "weakening" in the Omicron form, and the reopening started just a few days after China had been shaken by the largest demonstration of public unrest since Chinese President Xi Jinping took office in 2012.

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