"I rebel—therefore we exist"

On the protests in China

Michelle and Albert here. Last weekend we were glued to our phones, waiting for updates from Twitter’s “Teacher Li,” who was posting clip after clip of protests in Ürümqi, Zhengzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and across China.

On the night of November 24, an electric fire broke out on the fourteenth floor of a twenty-one-story apartment building in Ürümqi. It soon spread to other floors. Firefighters made it to the scene, but videos show they failed to get close enough to the building, and resorted to shooting jets of water that fell short of the fire. Videos of the fire soon began to circulate. In one of the most horrifying videos, you can hear people screaming to open the doors that had been bolted shut or obstructed with wooden bars.

The official count says ten people died, but other estimates put the deaths in the dozens; a Uighur news source claims it was actually forty-four. Among the dead are four children, siblings aged from four to thirteen, who perished along with their moth…