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Comment by gerbilly | Hacker News Reader

It seems like condos and apartments can easily be turned into prisons. I'm glad I live in a house, even if it is in north america.

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I lived in an urban village in China during the 2020 lockdowns and literally overnight the authorities erected 6+ foot high fences around my whole neighborhood. Entry and exit to the newly-minted gated community was funneled through two checkpoints that never existed prior to COVID. Authorities were actively patrolling the streets checking ID and ensuring nobody jumped the fence. If an authoritarian government wants to restrict the movements of their population badly enough, they will find a way.

I’ve seen pictures of those barriers. I’ve wondered how China was able to source those materials so quickly.

I know China is amazing a manufacturing anything at scale but I can only imagine having the wide deployment of something like chain linked fencing available instead of large barriers.

Did they have a stock of them ready?

I don't know for certain, but I suspect most jurisdictions in China maintain large amounts of riot control supplies as part of their "public safety" equipment.

One thing that struck me in living and traveling in China was the number of emergency supply caches. There are signs pointing them out in parks, metro stations and many other public spaces. In my head I always imagined those store rooms and bunkers to contain things like potable water, blankets, sandbags and so on, but perhaps that's also where they store the barriers and truncheons?

Either way, if there's one thing the Chinese government historically does well, it's the logistics behind controlling the movement of over a billion people. That's why the current situation in Shanghai is such an embarrassment - the one thing that everyone trusts the government to be able to do well is failing. I expect they'll get on top of it sooner or later, same as they did in Wuhan 2020, and then the narrative will change, but for now people are feeling pretty upset.

>100% of all villages had erected strict and high barriers to quarantine their villages off from the rest of the China.

https://www.ifpri.org/blog/lockdowns-are-protecting-chinas-r...

You may not be locked inside your house but you can still be locked in your village, which may not have food either.

But it's probably easier to get a truckload of food in than it is to deliver groceries to each unit one by one?

Do you think they wouldn't be able to keep you inside a house?

Yes?

It'd be almost impossible to police, although you could in theory do it. An apartment building can have its main doors locked and bolted and guarded by a few police and that might trap hundreds of people.

I mean, house arrest is less about guarding the doors and more about catching people out on the streets. Plus, you'd secure the stores (which are deigned to be locked up) to discourage people if you wanted to lock up an American suburb.

In the short term it might work but if people start literally starving there's one tool that Americans are more likely to have and might start using. It would be total chaos.

Yes, they could, but could they keep everyone in a city of millions in their houses though?

Yes. It's happened before. After the Boston Marathon bombing there was a "shelter-in-place" order given that prevented anyone from leaving their homes, and subjected residents to military rule (including door-to-door warrantless searches).

And otherwise you create snitch lines for people who sneak out at night time. Kinda like New York did for COVID violators.

It's doable, but not really scalable. I doubt they'll be able to pull that off in every US city simultaneously.

Easily. It's just a matter of running through the streets at random and punishing the people they caught badly enough.

Pretty much. In the Uyghur concentration camps they regularly gather up the victims of the camps and have them watch beatings and brutal rapes. I've read that in the testimony of several escapees from the camps. That plus everyone gets "minorly" tortured for not learning Chinese fast enough or minor transgressions like looking away/closing eyes/crying when told to watch a beating.

They would ring fence the village / suburb.

I don't see a major difference between nothing entering or leaving an apartment compared to entering or leaving the village / suburb.

Both will run out of food in a similar time span.

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