While Americans celebrated Thanksgiving with friends and family, an apartment fire killed ten people in China’s far-western province of Xinjiang.
News of the disaster quickly spread across the country, leading to vigils being organized. Many of these vigils, however, swiftly turned into agitated protests against the government’s totalitarian covid policies. Citizens were quick to make the connection between the zero-covid lockdowns and the delayed response to the deadly fire, which took place in the heavily Muslim province that is now infamous as the location of China’s genocide against its Uighur residents.
Officials denied the connection, unsurprisingly, and one even blamed the victims for simply being “too weak.”
Protests of this scale have not been seen in China since the 1989 student-led movement centered in Tiananmen Square. The regime has pushed back on the protesters by arresting many, seizing phones to delete compromising footage, and doubling down on its covid policies, the New York Times reports. Chinese civilians, however, are not backing down. Some have even called for President Xi Jinping, just recently reaffirmed as the Communist regime’s supreme leader, to resign.
The Xinjiang fire has fused several chronic problems plaguing the Chinese Communist Party into a single salient one: President Xi’s stubborn nature. The rest of the world has learned to live with the coronavirus, but Xi can’t seem to move on. Once Xi’s initial efforts to downplay the virus failed, his government did a complete reversal and chose to pursue what is now dubbed a “zero-covid policy.”
This strong-arm strategy may have provided some use in the initial phases (although it was met with intense criticism from the outset), but it is increasingly proving to be worse than the disease itself. The lockdowns have severely hampered China’s economy, and thus the world’s, as factories are routinely being shut down to keep covid cases near zero. As these policies reverberate around the global economy, supply chain issues will persist and potentially worsen so long as Xi sticks to his guns.
The effects of Xi’s zero-covid policy are exacerbated by his refusal to allow Western-made mRNA vaccines into the country. China’s domestic vaccines have been shown to be far less effective at preventing spread and reducing illness, thus requiring more total lockdowns.
In addition to Xi’s covid strategy, the apartment fire also returned the spotlight back to his government’s relentless abuse of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang. Nowhere is China’s extreme surveillance measures better demonstrated, nor is there any place, save perhaps Hong Kong, that more strongly shows China’s intense desire to stifle any dissent or deviation from the Han Chinese culture than in Xinjiang. But now, with Han majority areas such as Shanghai symbolically linking arms with their fellow citizens in Xinjiang, Xi is facing the toughest challenge to his rule yet.
It is difficult to predict the outcome of social movements, as they can often hinge on fleeting moments of opportunity, but the sudden burst of resistance from Chinese citizens, and from the people of Iran in recent weeks, should serve as a warning to autocrats the world over that all peoples have their limits.
