Cadre issues plea for help after coronavirus ‘mercilessly robbed’ Chinese border city
- Dai Rongli, who was deputy mayor of Ruili for a year, says its people have lost hope and income after enduring multiple lockdowns
- His essay posted on social media has been widely circulated and prompted officials to defend their tough pandemic controls
Dai Rongli made the plea in an emotive essay posted to his WeChat account on Thursday. Titled “Ruili needs the motherland’s love and care”, it described the southwestern city as a place of broad banyan trees and home to ethnic minorities, and mentioned its history as an aircraft manufacturing base in the second Sino-Japanese war.
But the coronavirus had “mercilessly robbed this city time and again, squeezing dry the city’s last sign of life”, wrote Dai, who was deputy mayor for a year as part of a cadre training scheme and returned to Beijing in 2019.
He said the people of Ruili had lost hope and income after enduring multiple lockdowns, with officials sacked each time, and it now lacked finances and workers.
“This tiny city needs the support of the country’s strong army to allow local civil servants to finally breathe … or these long-term lockdowns will become a deadlock in the city’s development.”
The city in Yunnan province is home to nearly 270,000 people and has been subject to tough restrictions to contain multiple outbreaks and stop transmission from over the border.
Dai’s unusually candid comments have been widely circulated online, drawing more than 100,000 views on his personal WeChat page. That has prompted Ruili officials to defend their pandemic controls, and for Dai to say he was just sharing his observations as a citizen.
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Ruili mayor Shang Labian on Thursday dismissed Dai’s remarks, saying the city did not need help.
“The essay relied on outdated information from four to five years ago,” he told news website Thepaper.cn. The website also quoted Dai as saying he had received phone calls from Ruili authorities after his essay was published, without elaborating.
Dai released a statement on Thursday night chastising some media outlets for hyping up his post by emphasising his former role as deputy mayor, which was not mentioned in the essay.
Dai did not respond to requests for comment.
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Ruili officials held a Covid-19 press conference in the early hours of Friday, with the deputy mayor saying the city must continue with its tough controls.
“As long as Ruili has not had a day without cases, there is a risk of the virus spreading outwards. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain a strict policy on leaving Ruili to ensure the epidemic doesn’t spread … and affect the anti-epidemic efforts of the province and the country,” Yang Mou said, after acknowledging the “difficult times experienced by the masses”.
Residents can only leave Ruili after spending seven to 21 days in quarantine, part of it in a hotel, depending on the risk level of where they live in the city.
Yang said recent figures showed that more than 20 per cent of people arriving in Ruili tested positive for Covid-19, citing the city’s proximity to Myanmar as the reason for continued transmission.
Without mentioning Dai’s remarks, Yin Zhongde, a member of Ruili’s Communist Party standing committee, said the city had provided 68.8 million yuan (US$10.8 million) in hardship allowances and 23,000 packs of daily necessities and food, as well as consumer vouchers worth 3 million yuan.
China’s latest Covid-19 outbreak began on October 17 and was initially linked to Shanghai tourists who had visited the north of the country. It has now spread to at least 25 cities across 13 provinces, municipalities and regions. On Friday, the Inner Mongolia region – at the centre of the latest wave – logged 19 new local cases, all of which were detected through mass testing except for one patient, who was already isolated as a close contact of a confirmed case.
Central disease control authorities also visited the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, which recorded nine new local cases.
In the northwest, four cities in Gansu province have locked down a total of 34 residential communities to stop the spread of the virus.
And Beijing, with two new cases from Thursday, has cancelled hotel weddings in key districts and halted reservations for them in other areas.
Shanghai, meanwhile, announced that citizens aged 18 and over who were fully vaccinated more than six months ago will be able to get a booster shot starting from Monday.
