Comment Delayed emergency response to deadly wildfire has sparked protests calling for an end to months of quarantine in Xinjiang, the tightly controlled region of northwestern China and sparked a nationwide outcry over the restrictions imposed by the country’s “zero Covid” policy. Flames ripped through the upper floors of an apartment building in the center of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, on Thursday night, killing 10 people, including three children, while nine were hospitalized for smoke inhalation, officials said. According to an initial investigation, the fire was caused by a power socket that caught fire in a bedroom of one of the apartments. Videos shared on Chinese social media platforms showed fire trucks parked at a distance from the building spraying water that fell under the flames, prompting some to question if pandemic traffic restrictions prevented trucks from approaching or arriving quickly enough. On Friday night, Urumqi residents carrying China’s national flag rallied outside a local government building calling for the removal of carnations, according to videos widely circulated on the social media app WeChat. The Washington Post could not immediately verify the authenticity of the clips. The city’s mayor apologized and promised an investigation into the cause of the fire at a press conference Friday afternoon. Li Wensheng, the head of the fire rescue, denied that coronavirus restrictions hampered the response, instead blaming a narrow lane filled with parked cars for blocking fire engines’ access. “The ability of some residents to rescue themselves was very weak … and they were unable to escape,” Li said. He also disputed claims made online that residents were not allowed to leave or that the firehouse doors were locked. The official response only sparked outrage online, with many continuing to blame the government’s strict coronavirus policy. Critics said it was inappropriate for authorities to blame the victims and argued that central quarantine rules had caused vehicles to be abandoned on the road. On Saturday, authorities in Urumqi eased restrictions in some neighborhoods considered low-risk, the Associated Press reported. But other areas of the city remained under lockdown. Meanwhile, in Beijing, several residences lifted lockdowns after residents protested the restrictions, according to Reuters. Frustrations over the mismanagement and arbitrary restrictions of the coronavirus have escalated into protests across China in recent days. Authorities earlier this month announced that testing and quarantine requirements would be relaxed. But a record number of cases soon after prompted many major cities to confine millions to their homes, dashing hopes for a gradual reopening. China reported 34,909 local coronavirus cases on Saturday. Netizens have posted videos of residents in Beijing, Chongqing and elsewhere arguing with local officials over the quarantine measures. Violent clashes between police and workers at the world’s largest iPhone factory broke out in the central city of Zhengzhou on Wednesday as workers at the Foxconn factory were unhappy with lockdown conditions and the manufacturer’s alleged failure to honor contract terms. Workers are leaving the world’s largest iPhone factory in China due to virus restrictions The Urumqi fire follows a bus crash in September in which 27 people died while being taken to a quarantine center. In April, a sudden lockdown in Shanghai, China’s most populous city, sparked protests online and offline. Reports of suicides and restraint-related deaths, including a 3-year-old who died after his parents failed to get him to hospital, have further angered residents. Online criticism of the Urumqi fire appeared to briefly swamp censors, as it did after the death of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who tried to raise the alarm in late 2019 about the then-unknown coronavirus but was reprimanded by police. In a comment reposted online, one user wrote: “I was the one who jumped off the building, I was the one on the overturned bus, I was the one who left Foxconn on foot, I was the one who froze to death on the street, I was the one who didn’t i had income for months and i couldn’t pay for a veg bagel and i was the one who died in the fire. Even if none of them were me, next time I might as well be me.” With record Covid cases, China is scrambling to fill an immunity gap Protests like Friday’s are rare in Xinjiang, where authorities in 2017 launched a security crackdown that forced more than a million of the region’s Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mainly Muslim peoples into “re-education” programs. Xinjiang has suffered some of the harshest and longest-running coronavirus lockdowns in the country, with residents reporting being holed up in their homes for weeks without enough food. During the pandemic, some facilities previously used for what the Chinese government called “vocational education and training” were repurposed as quarantine centers. The United Nations concluded in August that human rights abuses in the region may amount to crimes against humanity. Chinese officials have signaled they want to move on from the crackdown, replacing the regional party chief in December and encouraging tourism. But Xinjiang is still one of the most heavily policed places in the world. Exiled Uyghur activists argue that the campaign of forced assimilation is far from over. National health authorities remain adamant that their strategy of stopping transmission as soon as possible and quarantining all positive cases is the only way to prevent a rise in serious cases and deaths. They fear that the lack of natural immunity among the elderly and other vulnerable groups could result in already overburdened hospitals being overwhelmed by patients. Critics of the policy are more concerned about collateral damage from the government’s uphill battle against more contagious variants: medical care denial or delay because patients do not test negative for coronavirus; mental health trauma from too much time confined to home; a financial cost that hits poorer families hardest. In Taiwan, Pride is a powerful combination of LGBTQ and democratic rights Online, many mocked the Xinjiang government for failing to get its story straight on the local coronavirus situation. On Saturday, Urumqi officials said the coronavirus was no longer circulating in the general population, while also reporting that there were 273 buildings in the city designated as being at high risk of transmission of the virus. Under state media articles that said Urumqi had “basically achieved zero Covid in society”, the most common comments were questions from stunned readers about how it could have happened so quickly. One user simply wrote six question marks. Even Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times newspaper, said official statements would not be enough to quell public anger and that the local government should ease restrictions. Regardless of the role China’s coronavirus policy may have played in the fire, the root cause of public discontent was that being under lockdown for several months “is really beyond what people can accept,” he wrote on WeChat. A resident of Urumqi in a low-risk area, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said people could move freely within their compound but could not go to work, drive on the streets or to move between districts. “In some neighborhoods all you can do is go outside for an hour,” the person said, using a Chinese term for when inmates are allowed to exercise outside. Lyric Li in Seoul and Vic Chiang and Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.
