People in Urumqi largely marched peacefully in big puffy winter jackets in the cold winter night.
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 pandemic-prevention volunteers wear, according to the videos.
By Saturday, most had been deleted by censors. 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 large-scale protests occurred Friday night. One of them said he had friends who participated.
The AP pinpointed the locations of two of the videos of the protests in different parts of Urumqi. In one video, police in face masks and hospital gowns faced off against shouting protesters. In another, one protester is speaking to a crowd about their demands. It is unclear how widespread the protests were.
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.
That promise was realised the next day, as Urumqi authorities announced that residents of low risk areas would be allowed to move freely within their neighborhoods. Still, many other neighborhoods remain under lockdown.
Officials also triumphantly declared Saturday that they had basically achieved “societal zero-COVID," meaning that there was no more community spread and that new infections were being detected only in people already under health monitoring, such as those in a centralised quarantine facility.
Social media users greeted the news with disbelief and sarcasm. “Only China can achieve this speed,” wrote one user on Weibo.
On Chinese social media, where trending topics are manipulated by censors, the “zero-COVID” announcement was number one trending hashtag on both Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, and Douyin, the Chinese edition of Tiktok. 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.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNoYW5uZWxuZXdzYXNpYS5jb20vYXNpYS9jaGluYXMteGluamlhbmctbG9vc2Vucy1zb21lLXJlc3RyaWN0aW9ucy1hZnRlci1sb2NrZG93bi1wcm90ZXN0cy0zMTAyOTU20gEA?oc=5
2022-11-26 13:56:00Z
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