'Employees would sneak out on to the fire escapes of the buildings to smoke, so management chained and locked all the fire escapes. After the fire started, people were either burned alive or jumped to their deaths on the street below.
It was a pivotal event in the American labor movement.
The Sino-vaccine is virtually useless against the Omicron variant of Covid. Rather than buy vaccines to stop people from dying, China is waiting for the development of its latest vaccine. Until that happens, the solution has been simple and brutal: lock people in their apartments...
...and then weld all of the fire escape doors shut.
When fires happen, people are burned alive, and sometimes the fire departments cannot enter the building. Because of news blackouts, it is difficult to know how many times this has happened, but it has happened, and continues to happen all over China.
Despite the Government's efforts, uncensored information about the outside world leaks in. Chinese citizens have been looking at videos of the World Cup, seeing people from all over the world sitting in the stands without wearing masks. The average citizen now knows that they are living in a nightmare unmatched anywhere else in the world.
Protests are met with brutality, which begets more protests. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the disasterous effects of the one-child policy. China is now the most rapidly aging society on earth. It is highly unlikely that China will reclaim a lot of the business it lost from Covid supply chain issues, as their population no longer has an inexhaustible pool of young workers.
And all of this is happening in a country where the top-down style of leadership has calcified the decision-making processes on the local level. How will government be administered if the top crumbles?
