Thousands of protesters took to the streets in China to protest the latest round of COVID-19 restrictions imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Since 2020, President Xi Jinping has adopted a “zero-COVID” policy, which Chinese authorities have used to justify brutal lockdown measures.
Video recently surfaced showing Chinese authorities wiring external doors shut, so residents were unable to escape from their apartments.
Following a lockdown that lasted more than 100 days, on Nov. 24, one of those apartment buildings — located in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region — caught fire, resulting in 10 deaths. Firefighters were delayed from reaching victims because of the CCP’s lockdown policies.
“The Chinese people took that as a lesson, and that's one of the main triggers of these large scale protests right now,” Joshup Philipp, investigative reporter and China expert at The Epoch Times, told Timcast in an interview.
“They're realizing the CCP will lock you in your home as you burn to death with you and your family and that for them is COVID lockdown,” Philipp explained. “They will turn your health code on your phone red, which means you have to go sign up for COVID camp and little concentration camps they're building.”
Chinese citizens are required to carry a color-coded digital health pass on their mobile devices. If a person receives a red alert, they are required to report to a state-run camp for isolation. Chinese officials have been accused of abusing the system, and sending red codes to protesters en masse, in a bid to quell uprisings.
Over the weekend, shocking video circulated showing China building makeshift hospitals and concentration camps comprised of 90,000 “isolation pods” capable of housing 250,000 people, signaling the government’s willingness to forcibly detain larger numbers of Chinese citizens against their will.
“People are seeing this coming on the horizon and they're kind of weighing the scales and they're saying, ‘You know, what, is it safer for me to be silent? Is it safer for me to just keep taking it on the chin and just keep dealing with it, whatever they wanna throw at me? Or is it safer for me to go on the streets and risk getting Tiananmen squared by the CCP, which one is safer?' And people are taking option two, because they see where they're heading,” Philipp said.
“They see where these policies, these lockdowns, these forever COVID policies, they see where that's leading and they don't want that,” he explained. “They're willing right now to go out and face the CCP and face who knows what, live organ harvesting maybe being shipped off and trains to who knows where, that for them is a safer option.”
Yesterday, Chinese authorities violently dispersed a crowd of protesters who were demanding their life savings back from banks that confiscated their funds amid a currency crisis. The incident marks the second time this year that large-scale protests erupted after banks withheld money people tried to withdraw.
On Nov. 26, facing a heavy police presence, thousands of protesters openly called for Xi and the CCP to step down.
Philipp says he believes that the hopelessness created by the Chinese government signaling its willingness to let its own citizens die in a failed bid to uphold health policy could destabilize the CCP’s reign.
“All of them are facing the prospect of death,” he said. “They know exactly what they're dealing with and they're willing to deal with that rather than face the future the CCP is offering them. They're past the point of no return.”
