The Ürümqi Fire (2022)
At 7:49 p.m. on November 24, 2022, a fire broke out in a high-rise in Ürümqi's Jixiangyuan compound. After 100+ days of citywide lockdown, the blaze killed at least 10 people; residents said COVID barricades blocked escape and rescue. Officials blamed residents' "weak self-rescue ability" — a line that ignited national fury. Two days later, the White Paper Movement erupted.
Contents
- Background: a city locked down 100+ days
- Who decided
- Detailed timeline
- Who executed
- Why rescue was obstructed
- The spark of the White Paper Movement
- Scale & Methodology
- Who opposed
- Impact
- November 25: the press conference and the streets
- Who the victims were
- Accountability and commemoration today
Background: a city locked down 100+ days
On August 10, 2022, Ürümqi entered lockdown. By the night of the fire, the city had been sealed for more than 100 days. Residents were ordered not to leave home; compound gates and unit doors were tied shut with wire and chains; private cars were ordered to stay parked, and many fire lanes were blocked by parked cars, anti-COVID bollards and fences.
It was not the first time lockdown had cost lives. In the preceding months, similar tragedies had repeated across China: a quarantine bus overturned in Guizhou killing 27, a 3-year-old boy in Lanzhou died of gas poisoning after COVID checkpoints delayed treatment, a woman in Hohhot jumped to her death because her unit door had been welded shut. Each time, officials blamed "accidents" or individuals; the lockdown itself was never questioned.
Meanwhile, in mid-November 2022, the State Council's joint prevention mechanism issued the "20 optimized measures," trying to balance zero-COVID with the economy. But at the local level, "excessive tightening at every layer" had long been the norm — officials would rather over-lockdown than risk being blamed for loosening. Ürümqi's 100+ day lockdown was the product of this institutional ratcheting.
Who decided
The ultimate decision-maker was Xi Jinping — the author of zero-COVID; the Ürümqi lockdown was executed by the city's party and government.
- Lockdown length: Ürümqi sealed from August 10, 2022; by the fire it had been locked down 100+ days (residents said 109). Most of Xinjiang had been sealed for three months.
- The measures: compound gates locked, building doors sealed, vehicles banned; residents confined for months.
- The fire: on the evening of November 24, 2022, a high-rise in the Jixiangyuan compound, Tianshan District, caught fire.
- Responsibility: it was the 100-plus-day lockdown that trapped residents, blocked fire lanes, and crippled the rescue.
Detailed timeline
November 24, 7:49 p.m.: A fire broke out in a 15th-floor apartment of Building 8, Jixiangyuan compound, Tianshan District. Flames spread to the 17th floor; thick smoke reached the 21st-floor top. In videos circulating online, the whole building was engulfed; trapped residents screamed "open the door!" and "save us!" from windows while the person filming could only sob, helpless.
7:49–10:35 p.m.: nearly three hours of firefighting. The official notice said firefighters "rushed to the scene immediately," yet the blaze was not extinguished until 10:35 p.m. Residents and netizens questioned whether fire engines had been blocked outside the compound by anti-COVID bollards, fences and parked cars, losing the golden rescue window — and whether sealed unit doors had trapped residents inside.
Early November 25: the Ürümqi government announced 10 dead and 9 with moderate smoke inhalation. The notice pointedly added that the compound was a "low-risk COVID area where residents could go downstairs," and officials later said residents had "weak self-rescue ability." Those two lines enraged the entire internet: a compound locked down for 100+ days was suddenly "low-risk, free to go downstairs"; residents burned to death, yet the fault lay in their "weak self-rescue."
November 25, daytime: Ürümqi residents took to the streets against the lockdown. That evening, Party secretary Yang Fasen bowed in apology at a press conference. The apology did not calm the anger — people wanted an end to lockdown, not a bow.
November 25, night: authorities cut power to some compounds and sent police cars patrolling to stop residents going out. But the protests had already spread nationwide through the internet.
Who executed
Execution chain: the Ürümqi party/government (lockdown orders) → neighborhoods/property managers (locks, barriers) → firefighters (rescue crippled).
- Escape blocked: building doors sealed, corridors piled with anti-epidemic supplies; residents couldn't flee in time.
- Fire lanes blocked: long-parked cars and lockdown barriers kept fire engines from reaching the burning tower.
- Slow rescue: the blaze burned for hours before being put out; residents suffocated or burned in the smoke.
- The official line: "no wire bindings," "fire lanes clear" — contradicted by residents' videos and testimony.
Why rescue was obstructed
After the fire, the central dispute was one question: did lockdown measures obstruct escape and rescue? Officials insisted "fire lanes were clear," but multiple lines of evidence pointed the other way:
First, unit and compound doors were sealed. Multiple circulating videos showed apartment unit doors tied with wire; residents could not get downstairs on their own during the fire. Residents' group chats from the day before showed property managers telling people "don't run around." After 100+ days of lockdown, sealed doors were the norm.
Second, fire lanes were blocked. Anti-COVID bollards and fences installed during lockdown left no passage for fire engines; cars parked during the long lockdown clogged internal roads. In one video, onlookers tried to move cars to let a fire truck through, but the owners were themselves locked at home and could not come down to move them.
Third, rescue was delayed. From the 7:49 p.m. alarm to extinguishment at 10:35 p.m. — nearly three hours. For an indoor high-rise fire, that duration alone indicates abnormal obstruction.
Officials never acknowledged any causal link between lockdown and obstructed rescue. It was precisely this refusal — writing "the road was clear" and "weak self-rescue ability" into the notice — that turned a fire into a nationwide political event.
November 25: the press conference and the streets
The day after the fire, two things happened in Ürümqi: a press conference, and a march.
The streets moved first. During the day on November 25, residents of multiple compounds broke through lockdown fencing and took to the streets chanting "Lift the lockdown." In the most widely shared videos, crowds surged toward the municipal government and faced rows of police; one man shouted at the camera: "We have been locked in for over a hundred days." That night, more residents gathered outside the government building demanding officials come out and talk. It was the first time in three years of zero-COVID that residents of a provincial capital had taken to the streets en masse — voting with their feet, not just complaining online.
The press conference followed. On the evening of November 25, Ürümqi held a COVID press conference. Party secretary Yang Fasen bowed in apology, saying the fire caused him "deep pain." Fire and rescue detachment chief Li Wensheng briefed the blaze: it started in a 15th-floor home in Building 8, officially attributed to an electrical fault igniting combustibles, spreading upward; he added that in the fire "some residents had weak self-rescue ability" and were unfamiliar with escape routes. The briefing stressed that Jixiangyuan was a low-risk COVID compound where residents could go downstairs, that compound and unit doors had not been locked, and that fire lanes were unobstructed.
Those three claims — "low-risk, free to go downstairs," "weak self-rescue ability," "lanes unobstructed" — flatly contradicted residents' lived experience of 100-plus days, and became the fuse for that night's explosion of public opinion. Netizens dug out lockdown-era photos and videos overnight: wire on unit doors, barriers in corridors, bollards at compound gates. In the official narrative, the fire was an accident; in residents' narrative, it was a disaster 100 days in the making. The collision of those two narratives is where the White Paper Movement began.
On November 26, Ürümqi announced the city had achieved "basic social zero" and that low-risk areas would resume normal life in phases. But that same day, candles were already lit on Shanghai's Ürümqi Road — the relay baton of protest had passed to the whole country (see White Paper Movement).
The spark of the White Paper Movement
The White Paper Movement should not be written as starting with "holding white paper" — it should be written as starting with this fire. Without the 10 lives lost on November 24, none of what followed would have happened.
November 25: Ürümqi residents marched demanding an end to lockdown — the first time in three years an entire city's residents openly took to the streets against zero-COVID.
November 26: Li Kangmeng, a student at Nanjing's Communication University of China, held up a blank sheet of paper on campus, mourning the fire victims and protesting lockdown. The photo spread online, and "white paper" became the symbol — when speech is censored into silence, a paper with "nothing written" says "everything."
November 26, evening: Shanghai residents gathered spontaneously on Ürümqi Road, lighting candles and laying flowers for the fire victims. Mourning turned into protest; crowds chanted "no to nucleic acid tests, yes to food; no to lockdown, yes to freedom" and "Xi Jinping step down, Communist Party step down." The street name itself — Ürümqi Road — became the metaphor.
November 27–28: protests spread to Beijing (Liangmaqiao), Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Xi'an, Zhengzhou and cities in at least 21 provinces, plus at least 91 universities (some counts say 207). Tsinghua students held up the "Friedmann equation"; Peking University students gathered below dormitories. It was the largest protest wave on mainland China since June Fourth, 1989.
December 7: the State Council's joint mechanism issued the "New Ten Measures," effectively ending zero-COVID. From January 8, 2023, COVID was managed as a Class B disease. One fire ended three years of zero-COVID — at the cost of at least 10 lives, and the countless protesters later secretly punished.
It must be noted that the overwhelming majority of the fire's victims were Uyghurs. Radio Free Asia reported all 10 dead were Uyghurs, including 48-year-old Qemernisa Abdurahman and her four youngest children. Some Uyghur activists have pointed out: Han netizens raged for "un-lockdown," but few asked why it was a Uyghur building that burned, and why lockdown in Uyghur neighborhoods was enforced with particular harshness.
Who the victims were
The official notice gave only numbers, never names. But through interviews by Radio Free Asia and other outlets, at least one family's faces among the 10 dead are known.
Qemernisa Abdurahman, 48, an Uyghur woman, died in the fire together with her four young children — aged roughly 5 to 13, according to Radio Free Asia — in Building 8, where the fire started. Her husband was in Turkey, unable to return; he learned what had happened from videos of his own compound burning on social media. He later told reporters that during the lockdown the family had been sealed at home, without even the chance to go downstairs for air.
The other victims were residents of the same building. RFA's interviews confirmed that all 10 dead were Uyghurs; officials never published a list or addressed the victims' identities. The World Uyghur Congress and other groups put the true death toll higher (44, 60-plus — see the table below, all marked unverified), but with scene videos deleted and families pressed into silence, independent verification remains impossible.
The families' situation afterward is barely documented. RFA reported that after the fire, controls over victims' families and Jixiangyuan residents tightened, and families were told not to speak publicly; on the fire's first anniversary in 2023, relatives told overseas media they had still never received even a complete list of the dead. For these ten families, "10 dead, 9 injured" is not a question of statistical methodology — it is the page permanently missing from the official account.
As for the nine injured in the official notice — "moderate inhalation lung injury" — their names, ages, conditions and recovery were likewise never published. Survivors of the fire have rarely appeared in public since; under Ürümqi's controls, speaking to foreign media is itself a risk. The dead unnamed, the injured unheard: that is this fire's final archival state, and a gap that overseas reporting — and this page — can only partly fill.
Scale & Methodology
| Source | Figure | About |
|---|---|---|
| Ürümqi government notice (Nov 25) | 10 dead, 9 with moderate smoke inhalation | Official figure; victim list never published; unverifiable by independent media. |
| Exile Uyghur media | 44 dead | Figure circulating after the fire; no verifiable list or evidence — marked unverified. |
| World Uyghur Congress | 60+ dead | Exile organization estimate; no independent verification — marked unverified. |
| Radio Free Asia (2022–2023) | All victims Uyghur; including a family of five | RFA verified some victims' identities: Qemernisa Abdurahman, 48, and her four youngest children. |
Who opposed
1. Victim scale: official: 10 dead, 9 injured. RFA-verified: all the dead were Uyghur. Higher figures circulate — unverified, not adopted.
2. The White Paper Movement's spark: that night, Ürümqi residents took to the streets against the lockdown. November 26–28, protests spread nationwide — Shanghai's Ürümqi Road, Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu — people holding blank paper: the White Paper Movement. The Ürümqi fire was the last straw that broke zero-COVID.
3. International attention: wide global coverage; foreign officials spoke out; UN human-rights bodies took note.
4. Outcome: after the fire, Ürümqi declared "basic social zero" and eased the lockdown; by early December the national zero-COVID policy effectively ended. But the 10 dead — all Uyghur — never came back.
Impact
Ended zero-COVID. Three years of zero-COVID survived countless "dynamic adjustments" untouched, yet collapsed within 13 days of fire-triggered protests. When the "New Ten Measures" were issued on December 7, no one held a funeral for zero-COVID — it died in an avoidable fire and three years of pent-up fury.
The largest protests since 1989. The White Paper Movement spanned at least 21 provinces, dozens of cities and over a hundred universities — mainland China's first nationwide street protests since June Fourth. Demonstrators moved from livelihood demands ("un-lockdown") to political slogans — "Xi Jinping step down, Communist Party step down" — the scene officials had feared most throughout three years of zero-COVID.
Secret purges continue. After the movement subsided, authorities retaliated against protesters. Many were detained and sentenced for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." In November 2023, Chen Pinlin, director of the White Paper documentary Ürümqi Road, was arrested; in January 2025 he was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months for "picking quarrels." Those who documented the truth became new victims.
Uyghur voices were marginalized. The irony: the movement was ignited by a fire that killed Uyghurs, but its mainstream narrative quickly became Han urban youth's demand for "un-lockdown." The camps and genocide — Uyghurs' most visceral suffering — rarely appeared in White Paper slogans. It was Uyghurs' building that burned; the fruit was picked by all — while Uyghurs remain in the camps to this day.
Accountability and commemoration today
Accountability: none. As of this page's last verification, the public record shows no official held responsible, disciplined or prosecuted for the fire, for the 100-plus-day lockdown regime, or for the false statements at the press conference. Party secretary Yang Fasen bowed at the briefing and remained in office; the fire official who spoke of residents' "weak self-rescue ability" faced no public sanction either. The fire investigation's conclusions were never published in full — no official document has ever given the families or the public a complete account of the cause, the rescue timeline, or the relationship between lockdown installations and the delay.
Commemoration: vanished inside the wall, continuing outside it. Ürümqi has no memorial to the fire; the burn marks at Jixiangyuan were long ago repaired away, and every November 24, posts about the fire on domestic social media are deleted or throttled. Memory moved overseas: in November 2023, exiled Uyghurs held candlelight commemorations in Istanbul and elsewhere; in 2023 and 2024, at White Paper anniversary gatherings in London, New York and other cities, the Ürümqi fire was among the first names read aloud — usually the opening item of the program.
The archive outside the wall. The footage from that night survived because thousands of netizens had already mirrored the videos beyond the firewall before deletion arrived. Visual-investigation teams at the BBC, The New York Times and other outlets verified the circulating clips frame by frame, confirming the timeline of fire engines held up outside the compound and residents calling for help from their windows. Radio Free Asia kept tracking the victims' families and Jixiangyuan residents for years afterward — one of the few outlets still updating this story. These reports, interviews and images sit on overseas servers and in overseas archives, in plain contrast to the emptied search results inside China: one fire, two fates of memory.
The other face of erasure. Both place-names tied to the fire became sensitive: Shanghai's "Ürümqi Road" sign was briefly removed in the early hours of November 28, 2022 (later restored), and in late November 2023 and 2024 the street was heavily policed; searches for "Jixiangyuan" are restricted on domestic platforms. The largest question the fire burned open — whether lockdown may be enforced at the price of human life — has never been permitted public discussion in China. That is why this page exists: to pin the times, the place, the names and the competing accounts here, until a day when they can be asked about openly.
Videos
Footage of the Ürümqi fire and the protests that followed: the November 24 blaze, residents taking to the streets on the 25th, fire lanes blocked by bollards.
Mirror Media report: residents reveal the fire's truth — lockdown obstructed escape, fire engines couldn't get close; related videos censored on Chinese social media.
Related images (external links)
- White Paper protests image category — Wikimedia Commons (protest photos from various cities)
- COVID-19 lockdowns in China image category — Wikimedia Commons
Note: fire-scene photos are mostly copyrighted by news agencies (AP etc.) or of unclear provenance from social media; this page links externally rather than embedding.
Related Events
Sources & further reading
- Voice of America, "In China, Spirit of White Paper Protests Still Inspires" (Nov 25, 2023) — ink
- Radio Free Asia, "Overseas activists mark Urumqi fire, 'white paper' protest anniversary" (Nov 25, 2024) — ink
- Radio Free Asia, "One year later, Uyghurs demand accountability for deadly Urumqi fire" (Nov 27, 2023) — ink
- Chinese Wikipedia, "白纸运动" — ink
- Cantonese Wikipedia, "白紙行動" (with movement timeline) — ink
- VOCO News, "Director Chen Pinlin of White Paper documentary 'Ürümqi Road' sentenced to 3.5 years" (Jan 2025) — ink