A bus accident with 27 dead and 20 injured has once again highlighted the drastic zero-Covid policy in China.

The casualties are people who were to be taken from the provincial capital of Guizhou to a quarantine hotel more than 200 kilometers away for disease control reasons.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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The local government left it open whether they were infected with Corona themselves or whether they had only lived in the same high-rise building with infected people and were therefore considered contact persons.

The bus overturned around 2:40 a.m. Sunday morning for unknown reasons and landed in a ditch, the local government said in a statement.

Guiyang is said to have rushed those affected out of the city

The news of the accident caused a storm of indignation on the Chinese internet.

On the one hand, there is a night-time driving ban for intercity buses between two and five in the morning in China, which was apparently ignored by the authorities.

The Sandu district where the accident occurred is very mountainous, and driving at night is particularly dangerous there.

On the other hand, the authorities in the provincial capital Guiyang are suspected of having hastily transported the victims out of the city in order to meet a target set by the provincial government.

Last week, it passed an action plan in which, among other things, the goal was set that from Monday onwards no new infections should occur outside of quarantine facilities in Guiyang.

Similar requirements have already been made in other cities.

They commonly result in residents of residential areas where Corona cases have occurred being moved to quarantine hotels and temporary accommodation in other places on a large scale so that they no longer appear in their own statistics.

The day before the accident, the city of Guiyang announced in a press conference that its quarantine capacity was exhausted.

Therefore, more than 7,000 people have already been taken to other cities and regions in the province.

Another 3000 were to follow.

According to the action plan, the measures should contribute to a successful 20th Communist Party Congress.

Such formulations can currently be found in many official documents.

However, it can be assumed that local authorities across the country are under particular pressure to contain corona outbreaks because of the party congress starting on October 16, so that state and party leader Xi Jinping can present his zero-Covid policy as a success can.

Criticism also aroused the fact that the driver of the crashed bus was wearing a full body suit including eye protection.

This could have affected his concentration and responsiveness, the speculation goes.

Criticism of the zero-Covid strategy censored

Many critical posts about the accident and the zero Covid strategy have been deleted by the censors.

Tens of thousands of comments were found among some that remained accessible.

While critical hashtags could hardly be used on Monday, official texts on the subject were distributed under the hashtag "Guiyang apologizes to the whole of society".

How great the public interest was can be seen from the fact that posts under this hashtag alone were viewed more than 590 million times by the evening.

Many comments sarcastically pointed out that the government justified its drastic corona measures with the fact that in China, unlike allegedly in Western countries, people's lives have priority.

Many residents of the provincial capital Guiyang have not been able to leave their homes for more than two weeks.

At the beginning of the lockdown, there were supply bottlenecks.

Several residents told the FAZ that they went hungry for two days or only had access to food thanks to the support of neighbors.

"We still don't know how long the lockdown will last," said a resident on Monday.

Meanwhile, the authorities distributed food packages every two to three days.

As an expression of grief for the victims of the bus accident, all residents turned off their lights at the same time on Sunday evening, she reported.

There had also been sharp criticism of the corona measures from Tibet and Xinjiang in the past few weeks.

Among other things, residents of the Tibetan capital Lhasa distributed videos of temporary bed camps with questionable hygienic conditions.

A video from the city of Yining in Xinjiang showed Uyghurs complaining of hunger and confronting a local cadre.

It is to be feared that ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang are particularly vulnerable to the drastic corona measures because they can hardly make their displeasure heard.

Time and again in China, people are arrested who are said to have spread "rumors" about the corona measures.