Category: Featured

EXCLUSIVE: China Stonewalled US Offer of COVID-19 Assistance During Early Days of Pandemic, Emails Show

Three days after Beijing officially acknowledged a cluster of an unknown pneumonia disease in 2020, then-head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Robert Redfield asked his Chinese counterpart George Gao to get on the phone. “I’ve been trying to reach you and will try again in a few hours,” he wrote,…


Wuhan Lab Allowed to Destroy ‘Secret Files’ Under Its Partnership with US National Lab, Agreement Shows

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has the right to make a partnering U.S. lab wipe all data arising from their collaborative work, a legal document reveals. A memorandum of understanding (MOU) of cooperation, signed between the Wuhan lab and the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch, makes it obligatory for…


Beijing’s Hardline COVID-19 Response Pushes Shanghai to the Brink

Food donations have been left rotting on sidewalks and in trash piles even as elites in China’s wealthiest city lay struggle to ensure their next meal. Starving locals have taken to banging pots and pans from their balconies while screaming out demands for food. From the quarantine centers, videos have emerged of people being locked…


Accounts of Suffering Escape From Locked-Down Shanghai

Food donations have been left rotting on sidewalks and in trash piles even as elites in China’s wealthiest city lay struggle to ensure their next meal. Starving locals have taken to banging pots and pans from their balconies while screaming out demands for food. From the quarantine centers, videos have emerged of people being locked…


Accounts of Suffering, Starvation Mount in Locked-Down Shanghai

After four days of trying to order food online to no avail, a man of around 30 from Shanghai’s Yangpu district called the police. The sealed-in resident wanted to know if he would get fed if he charged out of his residential compound and got arrested for breaking quarantine rules. His food purchase placed through…


Unrecorded Deaths Plague Aged-Care Facilities in Locked-Down Shanghai

In 20 days, she would turn 100. The family had been counting the days to bring the Shanghai woman in front of 100 small cakes, surrounded by sparkling candles and grandchildren who grew into adults under her loving care. Little did they know that day would never come. The woman tested positive for COVID-19 on…


Forced Parent-Child Separations Fuel Outrage in Locked-Down Shanghai

Toddlers could be seen lumped in threes or fours on adult hospital beds in one ward, crying out for attention with no adults around. In another room the size of a large conference hall, long stretches of beds could be seen lined up from wall to wall, with only a few adults trying to soothe…


China’s Draconian Lockdowns Are Fueling Rising Discontent

After two years of living under some of the world’s most restrictive COVID-19 policies, a growing number of Chinese residents appear to have finally had enough. Rumblings of frustration can now be heard from inside residents’ buildings, on the streets, in hospitals, and on school campuses, a rare show of defiance in a country known…


‘I Beg You to Save My Husband’: China’s Mass Lockdowns Leave Locals to Fend for Themselves

On a road damp with rain, in front of a neighborhood officials’ office in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai, a kneeling woman’s heart-wrenching pleas for her dying husband tore through the frigid air. “I beg you to please do some good deed,” the woman beseeched while crying. “I beg you to save my husband.” Wearing…


China Locks Down 51 Million Amid COVID Surge, Igniting Public Outcry

Inside a newly-shutdown Chinese hospital deemed the latest COVID-19 outbreak hotspot, overworked nurses started a shouting match with doctors demanding basic measures of protection. In some Chinese universities, students broke down in tears after some were sealed inside their dorms without access to water or toilets. Elsewhere in some rental apartments, tenants were shocked to…