Added to the deadly fire in Xinjiang, the trigger for the protests is a long list of collateral casualties and the fatigue of the population
With the protests against the Covid 0 policy, the Chinese regime is facing its worst wave of civil outrage since the 1989 uprising that ended with the infamous Tiananmen massacre. Another very different thing is that they end up causing a movement as massive as that one. The reason is simple: the authorities have already started cracking down on the demonstrators who dared to take to the streets this weekend and shielded the places where they gathered with a strong police presence. Regardless of how far the protests go, it is clear that exhaustion has finally broken out due to Covid 0 restrictions and confinement, sinking the economy and preventing life from returning to normal.
The reason was the deadly fire last Thursday in a closed building in Urumqi, the capital of the Muslim region of Xinjiang, which has been closed for more than three months due to an outbreak of the corona virus. The ten who died in the fire, and there could be more, were burned to death without being able to leave their homes because of the bars installed between the floors and because of the delay in the arrival of the firefighters, whose trucks barriers could not pass because the streets were cut off by the lockdown.
The tragedy has exhausted the near-infinite patience of the Chinese, who are weighed down by restrictions and have been unable to travel for more than two years, either abroad or at times domestically, as they watch the rest of the world return to normality. Particularly hurtful is the World Cup in Qatar, which has forced state television to avoid mask-free close-ups of the crowded stands.
But that’s not the worst part, but the accumulation of abuses and additional tragedies that Covid 0’s draconian strategy is causing. Other misfortunes are added to the fire in Xinjiang. The most serious of these occurred in September in southern Guizhou province, where a quarantine bus carrying 47 people to an isolation center 250 kilometers from their homes overturned on a mountain road at dawn. Twenty-seven passengers died, sparking a barrage of criticism on social media despite the censorship.
Earlier this month, a three-year-old boy died of gas poisoning after his father was unable to get him to hospital in time due to lockdown checks in Lanzhou, the capital of eastern Gansu province. In Shanghai, whose 25 million inhabitants were trapped between hardships due to lack of food during the months of April and May, in addition to the 558 deaths from Covid, we must add an undetermined number of co-victims due to suicides, interrupted medical treatments and even patients who died. because they didn’t have a negative PCR test to enter a hospital.
The cases that caused the most outrage were that of a nurse who died of an asthma attack at the gates of a hospital she could not access, and that of the mother of a well-known Taiwanese economist, Larry Hsien, because her PCR was delayed for more than four hours and could not get the injection he needed for his kidney problems. In January, during Xi’an’s lockdown, a pregnant woman lost her baby at the gate of the hospital because her health QR code was not green.
All these cases, along with the internment in isolation camps under inhumane conditions and restrictions on movement, have broken the social contract the Chinese had with the Communist Party regime. In exchange for their freedom and lack of democracy, they enjoyed stability and prosperity, but the economy is sinking as the latest report from consultancy Nomura puts 20% of GDP under restraint and will reach 30% in the coming weeks.
Fed up with the restrictions, thousands of people have taken to protests in numerous cities from Beijing to Guangzhou through Shanghai and Wuhan, and university students have rioted against the closures on their campuses. Among their proclamations, they have called for freedom and for the end of the Communist Party and the resignation of President Xi Jinping. Such a challenge is historic because of the Chinese regime’s “Orwellian” control, which is tightening security to stop the protests, but faces its biggest challenge since Tiananmen.
Source: La Verdad
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