Ah, the videos of Shanghai I saw on Weibo last year must have been part of a CIA psyop, then.

That's an extreme outlier within China, and it was for a limited period of time. People were not kept in cages: they lived in their apartments. It was difficult to order food at first, but people managed, and the initial supply problems were alleviated.

Truly their experience must have been an inauthentic one, then.

> People were not kept in cages

What a hilarious nitpick at an obvious turn of phrase. Do you think I actually meant to say people were literally kept in little cells with bars?

Everything you said was ridiculous hyperbole. That's not a "nitpick." You took the most extreme thing that ever happened anywhere in China during the pandemic, wildly exaggerated it, and then presented it as normal life in China.

I said it was the authentic Chinese experience. Would you say the twenty some million denizens of Shanghai had an inauthentic experience?

The lockdown was a difficult but highly unusual event. However, it also wasn't nearly as extreme as you describe: people didn't live in cages and they didn't starve.