Footage released online on Tuesday showed workers donning top-to-bottom protective gear and preventing apartment building residents from exiting locked lobby doors after the previous day’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake centered in surrounding Sichuan province. The earthquake hit a mountainous area in Luding County, which is located on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Chengdu, where tectonic plates are being torn apart. Despite reporting few cases, Chengdu’s lockdown is the strictest since China’s largest city, Shanghai, went into lockdown over the summer, prompting rare protests in person and online. In total, 65 million Chinese in 33 cities including seven provincial capitals are now under varying levels of quarantine, while the government discourages domestic travel during the upcoming national holidays. Cases have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020. Most Chengdu residents are confined to their apartments or apartment complexes. In the eastern port city of Tianjin, classes were moved online after a handful of new cases were reported. China’s authoritarian communist political system requires strict adherence to measures dictated by the central leadership overwhelmingly dominated by party leader Xi Jinping. Local leaders, including the recently appointed provincial party secretary of Sichuan, are often parachuted in from Beijing with little knowledge of local conditions and a firm mandate to carry out Xi’s dictates. The ruthless and often chaotic enforcement of the lockdown in Shanghai has led to widespread complaints of shortages of food, medicine and access to healthcare. In a sign of how little has changed, at least one district in Chengdu has even banned takeout and coffee orders, according to a statement posted online. China has stuck to its tough “zero-Covid” policy of mandatory checks, lockdowns, quarantines and masks, despite advice from the World Health Organization, and has been moved by most other countries to reopen since the virus was first detected in the central China. Wuhan city in late 2019. China on Tuesday reported 1,499 new cases of local infection, most of them asymptomatic. Sichuan accounted for 138 of this total. The earthquake knocked out electricity and damaged buildings in the historic mountain town of Moxi in Tibet’s Garze Autonomous Prefecture, where 37 people were killed. Tents were erected for more than 50,000 people displaced from homes made unsafe by the quake, the official Xinhua news agency reported. State broadcaster CCTV showed rescue crews pulling an apparently unharmed woman from a collapsed house in Moxi, where many of the buildings are made of wood and brick. About 150 people were reported with varying degrees of injuries. Another 28 people were killed in neighboring Shimian County on the outskirts of Ya’an city. State media reported 248 injured, mostly in Moxi, and another 16 people missing. Along with the deaths, authorities reported landslides that damaged homes, caused power outages and trapped people behind a newly created lake. A landslide blocked a rural highway, leaving it strewn with boulders. The earthquake and lockdown follow a heat wave and drought that has led to water shortages and power outages due to Sichuan’s reliance on hydropower.
