🎧 In today's episode of The Journal podcast, BrianSpegele takes us inside China's biggest protests in decades
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Brian Spegele: They basically just start walking on the streets completely unobstructed. Traffic is closed down, and they're chanting, we don't want PCR tests, we want freedom.Brian Spegele: I took the bike up onto an overpass, a walkway over the 3rd Ring Road to kind of look out over the scene of what was going on, and I could see protestors kind of out in front of me on the ground, and they were kind of surrounded by police.
Brian Spegele: So as part of the COVID lockdown, many people in Xinjiang have been confined to their apartments for three months, effectively not allowed to go outside. And in Xinjiang there was a fire in one of the apartment buildings and while we don't know all of the details of what exactly transpired, what seems very clear at this point is that the fire department was obstructed from getting in to stop the fire in a timely manner.
Brian Spegele: So the government wants COVID to be at zero. That's their stated goal. They want no community level transmission of COVID, and if there is community level transmission, they want to cut those lines of transmission as quickly as possible. Put everybody who's been exposed to the virus in quarantine to make sure that they effectively know where the virus is at all times.Brian Spegele: I'll give you a sample of what my life looks like as an urban person living in China.
Brian Spegele: The government's point of view is we are saving lives. COVID, in their view, is very dangerous. And I think also in the Chinese context, what they would argue is that our healthcare system in China is not prepared to deal with an outbreak like this in the same way that the West could deal with it.
Brian Spegele: The pictures started flowing out from Urumqi pretty quickly after the fire. People demanding what is the government doing? Why are people dying in these sorts of circumstances and why have we been kept at home for three months? Brian Spegele: What I saw on Sunday night was police who were clearly seeking to avoid any escalation. They weren't the special forces of the police force, which you see sometimes in Chinese protests. These were, as far as I could tell, the normal cops mixed in with plain clothes security agents in the crowd. There wasn't significant amounts of violence on either side. And so that was day one.
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