[I]t this moment, when thousands of Chinese are protesting throughout the nation, we need to remind ourselves of just how terrible unfreedom is. Did we make mistakes in the way we handled a once-in-a-century pandemic? Of course we did. But we have a free press and disbursed, decentralized power through our federal system and independent courts. Accountability, while imperfect, is built into the system.

In China, by contrast, the ukase is issued by the ruler. Even if he is wise and benevolent (and the kind of people who climb that greasy pole never are), he can make mistakes. We have mechanisms for self-correction. The Chinese system does not. It criminalizes dissent and crushes independent voices. One party. One ruler.

The overflow of frustration and rage we are seeing today throughout China regarding Xi Jinping's "zero COVID" policy started with an apartment fire in the city of Urumqi. Ten people died and others were injured. Fires happen everywhere of course, but what particularly ignited outrage were the cell phone videos showing fire trucks parked several blocks from the building impotently spraying water that fell short of the target. Why couldn't the firefighters reach the apartments? Some cite the pandemic barriers in the streets making approach impossible. Others note the cars abandoned by residents who've been forbidden to leave their apartments for the past three months. Worst of all, the fire escapes were locked.

People in Europe and North America protested when their local governments required masks or testing or closed schools and businesses for a time, but China's COVID lockdowns are different in kind, not in degree, and the people's suffering serves as a reminder of why representative government, free institutions, and accountability are not just bromides, but matters of life and death.

Urumqi is the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the part of China known as an "open-air prison" for Muslims (and also the site of the concentration camps that Trump praised for Xi for erecting), but the lockdowns are happening throughout the country on a rolling basis. Our use of the term "lockdown" was always exaggerated. In China, they literally locked the doors of apartment buildings. Videos from the spring and summer showed people screaming from their apartments in Shanghai. Some cried "We're starving." In other cities, people imprisoned in their apartments (some not even permitted to crack a window) have posted heart-breaking videos. A distraught father said his children had not eaten in three days. In Xi'an, a heavily pregnant woman was denied entry to a hospital because she hadn't been tested recently enough. She went into labor on the street. Her 8-month-old fetus was stillborn. Children, including babies, who test positive can be removed from their parents' care and confined to quarantine centers. In China, if you are even in the same apartment complex as someone who tests positive, you can be forcibly quarantined.

Don't complain. Not in China. It's unpatriotic to question the wisdom of the party. A 24-year-old woman who posted something about the Urumqi fire online was arrested and charged with "spreading untrue information." That's SOP in China. Ask the residents of formerly-free Hong Kong what happens to those who speak up. Nor is the regime embarrassed by its repression. As the residents of Shanghai cried out in anguish from their apartment prisons, they were greeted by drones broadcasting a message: "Please comply with COVID restrictions. Control your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing." You will learn to love Big Brother.

When critics would tally the human rights abuses, lies, tortures, and deaths at the hands of the Soviet communists, the regime would reply that "In order to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs." But then, as now, people ask: Where's the omelet?

In the first year, it seemed that China's harsh lockdowns along with testing and tracing kept the total number of COVID deaths down. But China went all in on "zero COVID." While most nations waited impatiently for vaccines to be available and then vaccinated as rapidly as they could manage, China declined to purchase the U.S./German mRNA shots. They insisted on using a domestically-produced Sinovac vaccine, which is significantly less effective. Large numbers of China's elderly population (numbers are hard to come by) are unvaccinated, which leaves them vulnerable as new, more contagious variants of COVID are spreading.

Whereas most of the world is emerging from the COVID pandemic, China's bad decisions have left it still in the throes. Infection rates are climbing, the economy is slowing, and after three years of cruel measures, the people are fed up.