Authorities in Urumqi in China’s far west said on Saturday the city would lift coronavirus restrictions “in phases” after footage surfaced online showing rare protests against a three-month lockdown. The surprise announcement in the Xinjiang capital came hours after videos circulated online apparently showing Urumqi residents protesting on Friday night over a residential fire that killed 10 and injured nine people on Thursday. The footage – later censored – showed hundreds of residents in a public square outside a government office, chanting slogans such as “serve the people” and “end the lockdown” and singing the national anthem. Other clips showed scuffles between residents and people in hazmat suits in the street. On Saturday morning, Xinjiang’s Communist Party committee met and ordered the Urumqi government to “solidly” work to maintain social order and clamp down on any “violent resistance against Covid control measures”. An avalanche of angry online posts about the official explanation for the fire swept also across Chinese social media, with some internet users comparing the outcry to that following the death of whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang, who died of Covid-19 in 2020 after being reprimanded for alerting his friends about the new disease. An Urumqi resident reached by the South China Morning Post said he could not leave his home to verify the videos or to discuss them with others. But he said residents were all aware of the clips and the city had reached a breaking point. “We have been locked down from summer to winter. Even the health workers can’t bear it and we have reached the breaking point,” he said. “The names of the residential complexes in those videos are all genuine.” The Urumqi fire has touched a raw nerve for many mainland residents worried that they could be locked in their residential building if a fire erupted at their home. Even under the more relaxed Covid restrictions announced by the government earlier this month, entire blocks have to be sealed off if a positive case is found. The fire on Thursday spread from the 15th floor to the 17th, and smoke billowed up to the 21st floor, taking almost four hours to extinguish. Xinjiang officials insisted that the building where the fire broke out was not sealed off and denied that the victims, most of them killed by inhaling toxic fumes, were blocked from escaping. But many internet users uploaded pictures and videos showing fire engines stuck in a narrow lane and unable to enter the complex. Other footage showed people in hazmat suits struggling to remove blockades to let fire engines in. Many internet users suggested that the lockdown had delayed firefighters. And on Friday, a local official added fuel to the simmering public anger by saying the victims could have escaped if they had better awareness of safety and self preservation. Also on Friday, Ma Xingrui, Xinjiang’s party boss, inspected Covid prevention efforts in Hotan prefecture, a hotspot for riots 10 years ago. Ma asked cadres to step up fire safety measures for high-rises and warehouses and “make unswerving effort to prevent any major incident”. Xinjiang ‘highlights difficulty of China maintaining zero-Covid policies’ On Saturday, Urumqi propaganda chief Sui Rong said that because of the lockdown and other Covid control measures, the city had “basically eliminated Covid cases in society” – meaning there was only a low number of cases among those who were not quarantined. Siu said there were still about 100 daily new cases in the city and promised to relax control measures gradually such as allowing some people to leave their home. However, more than 270 buildings were added to the list of high-risk areas on Saturday, preventing people in those buildings from leaving. Under the new rules, the governments can only seal off individual buildings instead of an entire district. China reported nearly 35,000 new community cases on Saturday, of which 31,504 were asymptomatic. Tensions over Covid restrictions have appeared across the country. A witness said that in Fengtai district in Beijing a recording of a person saying more than 100 people were locked inside was amplified over a loudspeaker coming from a guesthouse. Across the city at Beijing Sport University, students appealed for help on a public WeChat account saying they had been sent to quarantine facilities after one student was reportedly infected. In recent weeks, protests have erupted in Guangdong, Zhengzhou and Lhasa. But there is little indication that Beijing will relent on zero-Covid policy. On a trip to Chongqing on Friday, Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan told the municipality to wipe out Covid with greater precision and efficiency. Additional reporting by Guo Rui and Phoebe Zhang
