BEIJING — A deadly fire in
China’s northwest
Xinjiang region has spurred an outpouring of anger at the country’s zero-COVID
policy, as Beijing fights growing public fatigue over its hardline approach to
containing the coronavirus.
اضافة اعلان
Ten people were killed and nine injured when the
blaze ripped through a residential building in the regional capital Urumqi on
Thursday night, according to state news agency Xinhua.
Online posts circulating on both
Chinese and
overseas social media platforms since Friday have claimed that lengthy COVID
lockdowns in the city hampered rescue attempts.
Some videos appeared to show crowds of people taking
to the streets of Urumqi to protest the measures.
The action comes against a backdrop of mounting
public frustration over the government’s zero-tolerance approach to COVID and
follows sporadic protests in other cities.
China is the last major economy wedded to a
zero-COVID strategy, with authorities wielding snap lockdowns, lengthy
quarantines and mass testing to snuff out new outbreaks as they emerge.
Footage partially verified by AFP shows hundreds of
people massing outside the Urumqi city government offices during the night,
chanting: “Lift lockdowns!”
In another clip, dozens of people are seen marching
through a neighborhood in the east of the city, shouting the same slogan before
facing off with a line of hazmat-clad officials and angrily rebuking security
personnel.
AFP journalists were able to verify the videos by
geolocating local landmarks, but were unable to specify when exactly the
protests occurred.
A wave of anger simmered on the Weibo social media
platform on Friday amid claims that parked electric vehicles left without power
during lengthy lockdowns blocked fire engines from entering a narrow road to
the burning building.
“I’m also the one throwing myself off the roof,
trapped in an overturned (quarantine) bus, breaking out of isolation at the
Foxconn factory,” read one comment referencing several recent incidents blamed
on zero-COVID strictures.
Chinese authorities censor online content deemed
politically sensitive and appeared to have scrubbed many posts and hashtags
relating to the fire by Saturday morning.
Urumqi police said in a Friday post on Weibo that
they had detained a woman surnamed Su for “spreading online rumors” relating to
the number of casualties from the blaze.
Rare apology
An initial investigation
showed the blaze to have been caused by a board of electric sockets in the
family bedroom of one of the apartments, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
Rescue attempts were complicated by “a lack of
parking spaces and a large number of private vehicles parked on both sides” of
a narrow road to the building, city fire and rescue chief Li Wensheng told
reporters late Friday, CCTV said.
Urumqi mayor Maimaitiming Kade offered a rare formal
apology for the blaze at the briefing, according to the broadcaster.
But officials also pushed back against some of the
online allegations, denying that residents’ doors had been clamped shut with
iron wiring.
COVID controls have confined some communities in
Urumqi — a city of 4 million people — to their homes for weeks on end.
But in the wake of the protests, officials on
Saturday said the city “had basically reduced social transmissions to zero” and
would “restore the normal order of life for residents in low-risk areas in a
staged and orderly manner”.
Pandemic fatigue has been growing in China, with
violent protests erupting at a vast COVID-hit factory in the central city of
Zhengzhou in recent days due to a dispute over pay and labor conditions.
China recorded 34,909 new domestic infections on
Saturday, the vast majority of which were asymptomatic, according to the
National Health Commission.
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