South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Lockdown protests in Chinese city
Rare demonstrations show growing anger over official policies
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Authorities in China’s western Xinjiang region opened up some neighborhoods in the capital of Urumqi on Saturday after residents held extraordinary late-night demonstrations against the city’s draconian “zeroCOVID” lockdown that had lasted more than three months.
The displays of public defiance were fanned by anger over a fire in an apartment compound that had killed 10, according to the official death toll, as emergency workers took three hours to extinguish the blaze — a delay many attributed to obstacles caused by antivirus measures.
The demonstrations, as well as public anger online, are the latest signs of building frustration with China’s intense approach to controlling COVID-19. It’s the only major country in the world still fighting the pandemic through mass testing and lockdowns.
During Xinjiang’s lockdown, some residents elsewhere in the city have had their doors chained shut, including one who spoke to The Associated Press and declined to be named for fear of retribution. Many in Urumqi believe such bruteforce tactics may have prevented residents from escaping in Friday’s fire and that the official death toll was an undercount.
Officials denied the accusations, saying there were no barricades in the building and that residents were permitted to leave. Police clamped down on dissenting voices, announcing the arrest of a 24-yearold woman for spreading “untrue information” about the death toll online.
Anger boiled over after Urumqi city officials held a press conference about the fire in which they appeared to shift responsibility for the deaths onto the apartment tower’s residents.
Videos of protests featured people holding the Chinese flag and shouting “Open up, open up.” They spread rapidly on Chinese social media despite heavy censorship. In some scenes, people shouted and pushed against rows of men in the
white whole-body hazmat suits that local government workers and pandemicprevention volunteers wear, according to the videos.
The Associated Press could not independently verify all the videos, but two Urumqi residents who declined to be named out of fear of retribution said largescale protests occurred Friday night.
Given China’s vast security apparatus, protests are riskyanywhereinthecountry, but they are extraordinary in Xinjiang, which for years has been the target of a brutal security crackdown. 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.
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.”
In one video, which the AP could not independently verify, Urumqi’s top official, Yang Fasen, told angry protesters he would open up
low-risk areas of the city the following morning.
Officials also triumphantly declared Saturday that they had basically achieved “societal zeroCOVID,” meaning that there was no more community spread and that new infections were being detected only in people already under health monitoring.
Social media users greeted the news with disbelief and sarcasm. “Only China can achieve this speed,” wrote one user on Weibo.
The apartment fire and protests became a lightning rod for public anger, as millions shared posts questioning China’s pandemic controls or mocking the country’s stiff propaganda and harsh censorship controls.
The explosion of criticism marks a sharp turn in public opinion. Early on in the pandemic, China’s approach to controlling COVID-19 was hailed by its own citizens as minimizing deaths at a time when other countries were suffering devastating waves of infections. China’s leader Xi Jinping had held up the approach as an example of the superiority of the Chinese system in comparison to the West and especially the U.S., which had politicized the use of face masks and had difficulties enacting widespread lockdowns.
But support for “zeroCOVID” has cratered in recent months, as tragedies sparked public anger. This month, the Zhengzhou city government in the central province of Henan apologized for the death of a baby after a delay in receiving medical attention while suffering vomiting and diarrhea in quarantine at a hotel in Zhengzhou.
The government has doubled down on its policy even as it loosens some measures, such as shortening quarantine times. The central government has repeatedly said it will stick to “zero-COVID.”
Meanwhile, in Beijing, health authorities reported at least 2,454 new COVID19 cases on Saturday. Much of the city is also under lockdown.