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Protests against China’s restrictive COVID-19 measures appeared to erupt in a number of cities Saturday night, fueled by outrage over a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region.
Many protests could not be confirmed immediately, but police in Shanghai used pepper spray to disperse around 300 protesters who had gathered at Middle Urumqi Road at midnight, carrying flowers, candles, and signs reading “Urumqi, November 24, those who died rest in peace” to commemorate the ten deaths caused by a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital city of Urumqi.
Zhao, a protester who only gave his family name, said police beat one of his friends and pepper sprayed two others. He said police stomped his feet as he tried to stop them from taking his friend away. He lost his shoes in the process, and left the protest barefoot.
Zhao says protesters yelled slogans including “Xi Jinping, step down, Communist Party, step down,” “Unlock Xinjiang, unlock China,” “do not want PCR (tests), want freedom” and “press freedom.”
Around 100 police officers stood in a line, preventing some protesters from gathering or leaving, and buses carrying more police officers arrived later, according to Zhao.
Another protester, who only gave his family name Xu, said there were thousands of demonstrators, but police stood in the road and let protesters pass on the sidewalk.
Posts about the protest were immediately deleted from China’s social media, as the Communist Party of China frequently does to suppress criticism.
Authorities in the Xinjiang region opened up some neighborhoods in Urumqi earlier Saturday after residents staged extraordinary late-night protests against the city’s draconian “zero-COVID” lockdown, which had lasted more than three months. Many people claimed that anti-virus measures exacerbated the fire. It took emergency personnel three hours to extinguish the blaze, but officials denied the allegations, saying there were no barricades in the building and that residents were permitted to leave.
During Xinjiang’s lockdown, some residents had their doors physically chained shut, including one who spoke to The Associated Press but declined to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many people in Urumqi believe that such brute-force tactics may have prevented residents from fleeing the fire on Thursday, and that the official death toll is an undercount.
Anger erupted after Urumqi city officials held a press conference about the fire in which they appeared to shift blame for the deaths onto the residents of the apartment tower.
“Some residents’ ability to rescue themselves was too weak,” Li Wensheng, chief of Urumqi’s fire department, said.
Police cracked down on dissenting voices, arresting a 24-year-old woman for spreading “false information” about the death toll on the internet. On a cold winter night in Urumqi, people marched mostly peacefully in big puffy winter jackets late Friday.
Protesters were seen holding the Chinese flag and shouting “Open up, open up” in videos. Despite heavy censorship, they spread quickly on Chinese social media. According to the videos, people shouted and pushed against rows of men dressed in the white whole-body hazmat suits worn by local government workers and pandemic-prevention volunteers.
Censors had removed the majority of them by Saturday. The Associated Press was unable to independently verify all of the videos, but two Urumqi residents who declined to be identified for fear of repercussions said large-scale protests occurred Friday night. One of them said he had friends who participated.
The AP pinpointed the locations of two protest videos in different parts of Urumqi. In one video, police wearing face masks and hospital gowns clashed with yelling protesters. In another, a protester addresses a crowd about their demands. The extent of the protests is unknown.
The protests, as well as public outrage online, are the latest manifestations of growing dissatisfaction with China’s aggressive approach to controlling COVID-19. It is the only major country still fighting the pandemic through mass testing and lockdowns.
Protests are dangerous anywhere in China, but they are especially dangerous in Xinjiang, which has been the target of a brutal security crackdown for years. A huge number of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities have been swept into a vast network of camps and prisons, instilling fear that grips the region to this day.
Most of the protesters visible in the videos were Han Chinese. A Uyghur woman living in Urumqi said it was because Uyghurs were too scared to take to the streets despite their rage.
“Han Chinese people know they will not be punished if they speak against the lockdown,” she said, declining to be named for fear of retaliation against her family. “Uyghurs are different. If we dare say such things, we will be taken to prison or to the camps.”
Officials also declared triumphantly on Saturday that they had essentially achieved “societal zero-COVID,” which means that there was no more community spread and that new infections were detected only in people who were already being monitored for health issues, such as those in a centralized quarantine facility.
The outpouring of criticism represents a sea change in public opinion. Early in the pandemic, China’s approach to COVID-19 control was lauded by its own citizens for reducing deaths at a time when other countries were experiencing devastating waves of infection. I’m staying at a hotel in Zhengzhou.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had cited the approach as proof of the Chinese system’s superiority over the West, particularly the United States, which had politicized the use of face masks and had difficulty enacting widespread lockdowns.
However, public support for “zero-COVID” has dwindled in recent months as a result of tragedies. The city government of Zhengzhou in the central province of Henan apologized last week for the death of a 4-month-old baby. She died as a result of a delay in receiving medical care while suffering from vomiting and diarrhea in quarantine.
The government has tightened its policy even as it relaxes some measures, such as quarantine times. The central government has stated repeatedly that it will adhere to “zero COVID.”
Since August, many people in Xinjiang have been detained. Most have been denied the right to leave their homes, and some have reported dire conditions, including irregular food deliveries that have left residents hungry. The city reported 220 new cases on Friday, the vast majority of which were asymptomatic.
Source: TNE
