Is China heading toward another Tiananmen Square moment?

Lili Pike and Tom Nagorski

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In October, a man unfurled banners from a Beijing bridge calling for people to rise up against China’s restrictive covid policies and the Communist Party itself. He was alone that day and quickly arrested; the nationwide protests he hoped for did not materialize. But now they have. And they started because of a fire in an apartment building.

When word spread of the fire, the 10 fatalities and reports that rescue efforts may have been slowed by a covid lockdown, the apartment building tragedy turned into a national rallying cry.

It happened this past Thursday in Urumqi, in western China’s Xinjiang region. By the weekend, protests had spread from Urumqi to Shanghai, Nanjing and many other large cities — including Wuhan, where the world’s first major outbreak of covid-19 struck three years ago. The anger was expressed on Chinese social media platforms as well. At first, the protests appeared to take direct aim at the government’s “zero-covid” approach, under which even small outbreaks are met with severe measures — often including the confining of millions of people to their homes. “Lift the lockdown” was among the rallying cries. But in some instances, demonstrators went further — calling for broader freedoms and even an end to Communist Party rule.

In a country where public opposition to the central government and its policies is rare and swiftly punished, the weekend’s marches and gatherings amounted to the most powerful challenge to the party in years.

“It’s extremely significant,” said Teresa Wright, a political scientist at California State University, Long Beach, who studies protests in China. Other demonstrations against China’s zero-covid policy have simmered throughout the year, but the Urumqi fire has sparked a reaction that makes the earlier unrest seem minor by comparison. That in turn has prompted Wright and other scholars to draw comparisons between the demonstrations and those that filled Beijing’s Tiananmen Square more than three decades ago.

Is China heading toward another Tiananmen moment? It’s a question that would have seemed almost absurd to ask only one week ago.

From mourning to anger

The nationwide outburst was born in an unlikely place. Urumqi is the regional capital of Xinjiang, whose Uyghur population has faced widespread repression in recent years. The Associated Press reported that at least five of the 10 people who died in the fire were Uyghurs. The suffering of the Uyghur people doesn’t usually garner widespread attention among China’s majority Han population, but the deadly fire struck a chord for people across the country. Call it lockdown sympathy.

Urumqi had been under lockdown for more than 100 days, and social media commentators blamed locked building exits for the deaths in the apartment building. In many cases across China, the lockdowns have been literal; people have been locked in their buildings by local government workers, sometimes using bulky chains. Grid and other outlets haven’t been able to confirm that locked exits prevented the Urumqi residents from escaping, and the local government denied that the doors were locked, but in terms of the outrage, the facts may not have mattered; the fire stirred broader anger toward lockdowns in Urumqi and other cities across China. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, breaking news posts about the fire received more than 1.5 billion views, even though the story was hidden from the site’s trending topics list.

By Friday night, a crowd of hundreds had gathered outside a government building in Urumqi calling out “jie feng,” or “lift the lockdown,” according to videos from the scene. It would have been unusual anywhere in China; it was especially rare in a region that is so tightly controlled and policed.

People mourn for the victims of the fire at a road sign on Wulumuqi Road (also pronounced Urumqi) in Shanghai on Saturday.. (Future Publishing/Future Publishing via Getty Imag)

By the following day, the protests had spread across China. On the other side of the country in Shanghai, a street sign for Urumqi Road, named for the Xinjiang capital, became a gathering point for grief and anger. People honored the victims of the fire by placing candles and flowers near the sign. But what started as a vigil morphed quickly into a full-scale protest, drawing hundreds of people. The city’s residents are intimately familiar with the nightmares of zero-covid measures, having endured their own two-month-long lockdown last spring. Those two months threw the city into chaos — food delivery networks broke down, healthcare services were compromised, and smaller-scale protests followed, on and offline.

But this weekend’s scenes along Urumqi Road were different. Some messages were subtle: People held up white sheets of paper, a symbol used during the 2019 Hong Kong protests to show solidarity while also protesting censorship itself. Some wore masks with “404″ written on them — the all-too-familiar error message people get when a webpage has been blocked. Other demonstrators were more direct: People chanted “We want freedom,” and one protester called for President Xi Jinping to step down — a truly rare challenge in China and one that was echoed by some in the crowd, according to the New York Times.

By Sunday, the protests had spread to Beijing. Hundreds of people gathered by the Liangma River — a quarter of the city that is home to many embassies. The same white sheets of paper were held high, and chants for freedom rang through the night. Throughout China, other major cities joined the call — including Chengdu, Tianjin, Hangzhou and others.

The messages were echoed on university campuses. In Xi’an, Nanjing and at Beijing’s famed universities — Tsinghua and Peking — crowds of students gathered for vigils-turned-protests. College campuses have long been breeding grounds for dissent in China, and this weekend some students’ calls extended far beyond covid lockdowns to demands for greater democracy and freedom of expression.

There have been other covid-related tragedies in China — including a bus crash that killed 27 people who were being shipped to a quarantine facility in September. What was it about the Urumqi fire that sparked such a sudden and widespread movement?

Wright said the timing might have something to do with it. Many people in China had hoped that the party congress, held in October, would lead to a pivot away from the zero-covid restrictions. “Expectations were increased and then crushed,” she said. “Then you’ve got this fire in Urumqi being the tipping point.”

A Tiananmen moment?

Protests in today’s China aren’t unusual in themselves, as Grid recently reported; people take to the streets over local issues such as factory conditions and property issues frequently. They vent their anger on social media platforms, with varying degrees of success in evading government censors.

But the current protests are in a league of their own. Or perhaps, Wright argued, in a league with the handful of other major social movements that have challenged the party in recent decades — none more so than the 1989 protests at Tiananmen.

Like Tiananmen, the current protests have an ingredient that poses a particular challenge to the party: They have brought together a broad coalition of people across Chinese society.

“I would say one commonality between ’89 and the present is the fundamental frustration with perceived governmental corruption and authorities not being responsive to or attentive to the needs of the people,” Wright said. “So that’s something that can bring together people of different socioeconomic status and backgrounds, even if their specific concerns are somewhat different.”