cancelled phones
it would have to be the CCP cancelling the phones, I don’t think ppl can do it on their own. Most were low-income limited data ones, weren’t they? Some could be foreign students but I don’t think 10M or even 5M students fled. Student airlifts have been under a few thousand and they only had a few days to get out commercial so maybe another few thousand?
very strange. Maybe the hantavirus rodents ate them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/world/asia/china-coronavirus.html
I found the above article while running a search based on reports of piles of phones outside crematoriums in China. I didn’t find the piles of phones, but the article said that Chinese authorities were making people use their cell phones to document and show where they had traveled so they could be stopped if they had been in an infected area.
I wonder if folks dumped their phones so they couldn’t be tracked? Although then I would imagine the neighborhood guard would just say “No phone? No entry.”
Probably universal “Obama phones” that everyone was required to have. CCP controlled.
There could be an innocuous reason for it, I guess. Is China already implementing 5G domestically? Maybe the phones were incompatible.
It would require some evidence either way.