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Covid Still Finding New Ways to Kill People in China [1]

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Date: 2022-11-26

Visual Beauty of Urumqi at Night

Major news outlets have reported on a high-rise fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China that has claimed at least 10 lives and injured 9 more, including children. The fire broke out Thursday evening, local time, caused by a shorted-out electric strip.

Videos circulated on social media showed an arc of water from a distant fire truck falling short of the fire, sparking waves of angry comments online. Some said fire engines had been blocked by pandemic control barriers or by cars stranded after their owners were put in quarantine, but the reason why the truck was far away was unclear. Many Xinjiang residents are frustrated with China’s harsh COVID-19 controls. In September, some reported hunger amid spotty food deliveries. — apnews.com/…

Videos circulated on Chinese social media contained audio of a woman screaming, “save me, save me, open the door, open the door...” This translation was made for me by a Professor of Chinese Linguistics.

Due to China’s Zero-Covid policy, a policy on which Xi Jinping has staked his reputation, authorities have literally chained, or welded doors shut on apartment complexes when they felt residents weren’t cooperating fully with the draconian lockdown measures they had put in place. It is easy to understand why residents may be frustrated and no longer willing to give up their freedoms and livelihoods in an effort to stamp out a disease which is so highly transmissible:

Xinjiang has been under harsh lockdowns for over three months to combat the spread of the coronavirus under China’s zero-COVID policy. — apnews.com/...

The Urumqi City Government has denied that the emergency doors or other exits were locked shut, but those claims were refuted by building residents. The most objectionable and victim-blaming statement might have come from the head of the fire department, though:

“Some residents’ ability to rescue themselves was too weak ... and they failed to escape in time,” said Li Wensheng, head of the Urumqi City Fire Rescue department.

There has been more than the average amount of protest and even unrest in China this year. Three days ago, there was a riot at the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, where approximately 1000 frustrated workers battled police and public health workers in the street near the plant. — www.cnn.com/…

There was a riot in Guangzhou nine days ago. — www.nbcnews.com/…

There has been unrest in Chongqing, Shanghai and many other cities. We might think that the anger is building to a crescendo, and the deaths of children who were locked inside could just be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but unfortunately, the images and audio and posts that show the worst aspects of this story will be scrubbed from Chinese social media quickly. Target words will be fed into the algorithms, and soon Chinese at home and abroad may find their accounts locked if they use or share the wrong strings of words. It is an effective means of suppressing dissent, because it stops stories and memes from going viral or remaining in the public consciousness for long.

Western media often does its meagre share to erase these Chinese victims as well. Typical stories in western media focus only the economic and supply-of-goods aspects of Covid stories coming out of China and ignore the human aspect, but these are real people, and their suffering is real and immense. DW News out of Germany spends 32 seconds out of 6:13 on the human element before switching to economics:

I am under no illusion that any other entity on Earth besides the CCP in Beijing is the cause of the suffering of people throughout China. Still, it wouldn’t hurt if we showed compassion for the Chinese people by focusing on them more as people.

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