“During this lockdown, [authorities] they locked entire families in their homes… and even closed the doors,” Zumret Dout, a Uyghur activist and internment camp survivor now living in the US, told The Telegraph. “There is no emergency preparedness, even in the event of a fire or an earthquake, or a flood as happened recently in the city of Kashgar, there will be no help for the trapped residents. “This situation has been going on for more than 50 days now. People with chronic conditions and vulnerable populations such as the elderly, infants and children suffer the most,” added Ms Dawut. From her home in the state of Virginia, she watched videos posted by people inside Xinjiang on Douyin and reposted them on Facebook and Twitter before Chinese censors could remove them. In some videos, small groups of Uyghurs were seen confronting local officials over a lack of food supplies, in a rare display of dissent in the repressed region. While Ili authorities have not admitted to a formal lockdown, the prefecture’s deputy governor, Liu Qinghua, apologized for the failures to access medical services, saying they reflected “many weaknesses and weaknesses in the work of local authorities”. “The committee and the Communist Party government want to express their deepest apologies for the disruption of life caused to all ethnicities,” Mr. Liu said. Officials did not directly address complaints of hunger, but promised to secure enough food supplies and organize teams to send food to stranded families. Police in Yining, a county in Ili Prefecture, announced on Sunday that they had arrested four netizens for spreading “rumours” about the Covid lockdown. Authorities also ordered censors to flood social media with innocuous posts about life in Xinjiang – including food and tourism – to quell complaints about the lockdown, according to a leaked directive published by China Digital Times . Xinjiang’s Covid outbreak is relatively small, with just 28 new infections reported on Monday. Across the country, authorities reported a total of 1,094 new locally transmitted infections on Monday. Chinese officials cannot afford new major Covid cases, especially ahead of a major political conference in mid-October, when China’s President Xi Jinping is expected to begin a third term in office. Elsewhere in China, officials in the southern city of Guiyang were chastised this week for failing to contain the spread of the virus in some areas. Guiyang residents have previously complained online about food shortages amid the lockdown. While no Covid-related deaths have been reported in recent weeks in China, Radio Free Asia, a US government-sponsored news service, cited unnamed Xinjiang officials as saying about a dozen Ili residents died of starvation or lack of access to medicine. “The entire Uyghur diaspora is shocked by the extreme zero-Covid policy in Gulja,” said Gulruy Asqar, an exiled Uyghur activist, referring to the Uyghur name of Yining County. “We are so worried about our family members. They might go hungry too.”
