Protesters to China’s Tyrants: ‘Communist Party, Step Down!’

On Thursday, November 25, 2022, ten people were killed and nine more were injured in a fire in a residential tower in Urumqi, a city in China’s Xinjiang province.¹ Although such fires are common in China (thirty-eight people died in another fire in Anyang just three days earlier), the Urumqi fire exposed the human cost of China’s unjust “zero-COVID” policy and precipitated some of the most overt antigovernment protests China has seen in decades.

At the time of the fire, Urumqi was under strict lockdown. Residents were permitted to leave only for short periods to shop for groceries, and local authorities controlled when they could go. To enforce the policy, authorities installed fences around residential buildings and sometimes locked the gates outside of these time frames. “Residents don’t dare to go downstairs without permits,” one said, “as it will violate the law even if the building gate is not locked.” As the Urumqi fire blazed, the fencing around the building locked residents in and firefighters out.²

Chinese citizens have endured nearly three years of authoritarian COVID restrictions. Cities are subjected to snap lockdowns when a single case is detected; businesses are forced to close, and residents are shut in their homes. In January 2022, as China hosted the Winter Olympics, people in Xi’an were locked in their homes with dwindling supplies, with some bartering their cellphones for food.³ More recently, as Chinese state TV broadcast images of unmasked, cheering crowds at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, viewers stuck in lockdown went to social media to ask if China and Qatar are even “on the same planet.”⁴ In response, the Chinese government censored related social media comments and altered TV coverage to remove footage of the crowds.

In China, criticizing the government often results in arrest, beating, and imprisonment. It is understandable, therefore, that few people have been willing to stand up against the Chinese government’s authoritarian response to COVID-19. But the Urumqi fire inspired people to do more.

In the days following, thousands of ordinary people took to the streets in cities across the country to protest the lockdowns. . . .

About Thomas Walker-Werth

Thomas Walker-Werth is associate editor at The Objective Standard and a fellow at both Objective Standard Institute and Foundation for Economic Education. He is currently writing his first full-length book, Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life. See more of his work at walker-werth.com.

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