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China is about to find out what happens when a billion people get fed up and lose their patience. Joe Biden isn’t saying a word because he’s fully behind the exact same oppressive restrictions here. He can’t wait to start putting MAGA Republicans in “quarantine” camps. Places where those stuffed in a pod are more in isolation for their ideas than their health.
China facing riots
For three years now, “the patience of one billion people in China has been stretched, growing thinner and thinner with every lockdown and round of mass COVID testing,” BBC writes. “Now, that patience has snapped.” Literally thousands have already taken to the streets in mass protest against the heavy-handed restrictions. An “exhausted nation has been asking how much longer must they endure Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.”
In the central city of Zhengzhou, for instance, “hundreds of factory workers called for their rights and scuffled with police, as they smashed surveillance cameras and windows. In Chongqing in the south-west, a maskless man was filmed shouting ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!‘ – a rallying cry picked up by many protesters.” Americans are still on the couch.
Political pundits are calling the mass uprising “one of President Xi’s biggest political tests yet.” What they mean by that, is the Pooh Bear is backed into a corner and will be pulling out the tanks and troops any moment now. “But then there is a risk that local authorities might refuse to follow the directive closely as they are worn down by the zero-COVID rigidities too.”
NEW: China's Xi Jinping believes threats should be met with strength.
In the face of widespread Covid protests, he'd be smarter to show flexibility https://t.co/z4N8TsyE3M via @opinion
— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) November 29, 2022
The “Chinese Communist Party must now negotiate both mounting fury and a deep-rooted fear of COVID.” Everyone in China wants out of the pandemic. At least, out of lockdown.
An actual fire is what sparked the people’s latest revolution in China. Specifically, an apartment fire. The deadly incident happened in the western city of Urumqi. Ten people died in what BBC describes as “the ultimate nightmare scenario for millions of urban Chinese who live in high-rise apartments: trapped in one’s flat, unable to escape a roaring blaze because of a strictly enforced lockdown.”
Authorities dispute that people were burned alive because they allegedly had been exposed to COVID but that “did not stop public outrage and anxiety from spreading, especially after videos and audio clips purportedly featuring residents screaming and begging to be released circulated online.”
Latest horror story in a series
This incident may have sparked chaos and riots but it isn’t the first COVID panic horror story coming out of China. Only the latest episode of a series. “Early on, during city-wide lockdowns, reports surfaced of pregnant women losing their babies and the old and vulnerable dying, because of a lack of timely access to medical care.”
That piled on top of food and medicine shortages. It soon “became clear that local authorities were struggling to cope.”
Even more traumatic scenes surfaced, “such as a bus crash that killed dozens of people who were being ferried to quarantine centres, or children dying in quarantine facilities.”
China's major cities of Beijing and Shanghai are blanketed with security Tuesday in the wake of nationwide rallies calling for political freedoms and an end to Covid lockdownshttps://t.co/3YNMklcpY2 pic.twitter.com/nmGtzqe2VN
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 29, 2022
The recent “congress” China held firmly cemented Xi’s rule as de facto Emperor for life. He “made it clear there would be no change to zero COVID, provoking more dismay.”
The thing which brought everyone out in the streets to protest as a “unifying experience, breeding anger in many corners of China from major cities to far-flung regions like Xinjiang and Tibet,” is the suffering. The hardship “galvanized every part of society including university students, factory workers, middle-class families, and the elite.”
All it took was one man to stage “a protest on a Beijing bridge, shocking the country with its openly defiant criticism of President Xi.” That “set the bar for the expression of more direct and sharper dissent both outside and within China, emboldening many others.” Americans should be paying close attention.
