Three years of zero-COVID lockdowns in China served as a wake-up call to many Chinese people.
“The pandemic in the past three years made me see how evil the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is and how it has been persecuting us Chinese,” said Zheng Min, a Chinese woman from the coastal city of Qingdao in eastern Shandong Province.
Ms. Zheng and her brother’s family were living over a thousand miles away from each other during the pandemic—Ms. Zheng and her daughter lived in Qingdao; her brother’s family lived with their parents in Nanning, the capital city of China’s southern Guangxi region.
The stringent lockdowns impacted Chinese families throughout the country. The two siblings and their parents were confined within their dwellings, short of food, and subjected to constant mandatory COVID-19 PCR testing. Their mother was pushed down to the ground by pandemic control staffers when she tried to get out of her home to shop for food.
“Too many things happened during the three years of lockdowns,” said Ms. Zheng in a recent interview with the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times. “The Chinese Communist Party has been suppressing the Chinese people and has done many inhumane things to us.”
The whole family decided to flee China. The family of eight members arrived in the United States before Christmas last year after traveling for two months through several countries.
“We have run out of this hell, which we’ll never return,” said Ms. Zheng. Now that she lives in the United States, she still feels a chill when looking back at their life in China, according to Ms. Zheng.
Lacking Food, Mandatory Regular PCR Tests
Like other Chinese people throughout the country, Ms. Zheng and her family suffered severely from the strict lockdowns.
Life was hard when they could not go out to buy themselves food, Ms. Zheng said.
In Qingdao where Ms. Zheng and her child were living, a fever case at a local primary school triggered a sudden citywide lockdown. The two lived on a small bag of rice and some pickled and salted vegetables—the only food they had at home—for over ten days.
By Sophia Lam
