Originally published by Gatestone Institute
Commentary
Extraordinary protests quickly spread across China over the weekend, including major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, since a fire Thursday claimed a reported 10 lives in an apartment block in Urumqi, in the northwestern part of the country.
China’s people were enraged by the regime’s COVID controls, which had prevented firefighters from reaching the scene of the tragedy in time. “This is people past their breaking point,” tweeted CNN’s Selina Wang on Sunday.
Also on Sunday, the Telegraph’s Simina Mistreanu reported on Twitter that a crowd numbering at least 100 began marching toward Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the Chinese capital. Police, however, stopped demonstrators after only a few blocks, at the Liangma River. “The fact that they intended to protest at Tiananmen,” she wrote, “is wild.”…