I was also curious about this (it’s rather surprising news). This seems like tankie misinformation.
The only somewhat relevant source was this article in SCMP from Jan 17th where a Shanghai party official called from partial lifting of internet restrictions in some areas.
That being said, it doesn’t look like this went over well:
It is not clear when the post was put online but it was removed on Friday morning.
I tried two instances search.inetol.net and priv.au and I got no results for basic web search.
But northboot.xyz worked.
Am I missing something? How do I pick a given instance?