Despite having Vice Premier Sun Chunlan overseeing the process of eliminating COVID from Shanghai, the situation has not been going as smoothly as Beijing would have expected.
With a population of 26 million people, Shanghai is now going into its fifth straight week of city-wide lockdown in accordance with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “Dynamic zero-COVID” policy, an extreme and aggressive form of lockdown aimed to eliminate coronavirus transmission.
A resident behind barriers sealing off an area under lockdown in Shanghai on April 14, 2022. (Aly Song/Reuters)
However, with rising levels of public outrage and wide-scale tragedies caused by such extreme measures, some officials claim that the perplexing situation in Shanghai stems from its political significance to Xi.
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