Love and Murder in the Time of Covid by Qiu Xiaolong

Author:Qiu Xiaolong [Xiaolong, Qiu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2023-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Day 4

The mountain ranges stretching,

stretching far into the distance,

the river water meandering,

murmuring, I was worrying

about a sudden dead end

of the road when a village appeared

out of the blue, willows dimming

and flower brightening.

– Lu You

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

– Plato

Life … is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

– William Shakespeare

When you do not look at the flower,

both the flower and your mind fall in oblivion.

When you come to look at the flower,

its colors immediately brighten up.

So you know that the flower

grows only in your heart.

– Wang Yangming

Another post goes viral online. The CCP government and Netcops invariably repudiate any posts revealing the seamy side of Chinese society as rumors, but this one comes with a recording of two people talking on the phone in their real voices. The Xinjiang (New Territory) Uygur Autonomous Region also fell under the lockdown, with an even stricter, more severe zero-Covid policy. What’s the reason behind it? Your guess is as good as mine. For a long period, the word ‘Xinjiang’ was a politically sensitive word for the Baidu search, which more often than not showed ‘non-existent page.’ So it was extremely hard for people to move in and out of Xinjiang.

Anyway, in the phone recording, a middle-aged man was saying to a young woman, ‘I’ve heard that you’re anxious to go to Wuhan for the sake of your old and sick parents. To do that, you have to get a government-issued Xinjiang Exit Card. Here, the CCP is pushing state surveillance and suppression to the extreme, and people can hardly breathe with the suffocating zero-Covid policy. So the card is in high demand, and much more so in the Covid days. People are worried that the lockdown in Xinjiang could last indefinitely.

‘Now I happen to have a friend in charge of granting the Xinjiang Exit Card to people who are anxious to run, regardless of the expense. The fair black-market price is 8,000 yuan per card, but through his connection, I can obtain one card for you for 3,000 yuan. It comes with a condition, though. As soon as I get the card, you have to pay me the money, and you also have to sleep with me four times.’

She responded on the phone that she would think about it, but having recorded the phone conversation, she incorporated it into a post online. It’s a huge slap in the government’s face. Lest she should choose to reveal more, the Party authorities arrested the middle-aged man and granted her the card.

– The Wuhan File

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