The Hostile Forces of Beijing

On January 16th the friends of Cao Zhixin, a 27 year old book editor residing in Beijing, posted a video of Cao onto Youtube.1 The video spread quickly spread across Chinese language Twitter, and from there into newspaper reports in Great Britain, the United States, and Taiwan.2 In the video Cao speaks calmly and firmly, telling viewers about a chain of events that had begun two months before the video’s Youtube debut. In late November Cao and a group of friends—presumably not the same group that uploaded this video to Youtube—had organized a vigil in Beijing. The vigil was for the victims of a high-rise fire whose deaths were widely blamed on restrictive Zero-COVID policies; a series of videos of these fires then racing across WeChat showed local firefighters struggling to get past quarantine barriers in order to put out the growing blaze. These were scenes with revolutionary potential. Here was evidence, heart-breaking and rage inducing, that Zero-COVID took lives even as it claimed to save them. Chinese people were already taking to the streets to vent their frustration with Zero-COVID. The high-rise fire turned this trickle into a torrent. Cao’s vigil was one little ripple in that larger tide.

Women我们, “北京抗议青年：我们不想被消失，请救助我们Youth protestors in Beijing: We don’t want to be enforced to disappear. Help us,” Youtube Video, 4:52, 16 January 2022.

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