Tianjin

Liao Guoxun, the mayor of a major port city in northern China called Tianjin, died suddenly on Wednesday due to an undisclosed illness at the age of 59, China’s Caixin Global media outlet reported on Friday.

Compulsory mass coronavirus testing was ordered in parts of Beijing on Sunday following a runaway series of infections as China tightened anti-disease controls two weeks out from the Winter Olympics.

Tianjin, a Chinese port city directly bordering Beijing, recorded its “biggest rise in daily cases” of the coronavirus on Monday since a local outbreak of the disease started earlier this month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

Chinese Communist Party authorities forbade all of Tianjin’s 15 million residents from leaving the city on Sunday in an effort to contain the municipality’s recent Chinese coronavirus epidemic, which threatens to affect neighboring Beijing just 25 days before it is set to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Chinese journalist Wang Xiaolu has been arrested and has “confessed” to causing the stock market to crash in what the nation is calling its “Black Monday” last week. State media outlet Xinhua reports that nearly 200 others were also arrested for “causing panic” by “spreading rumors” in publications or on social media.

China’s government announced earlier this week that it had arrested 15,000 people for an assortment of cybercrimes, the result of a project announced in July titled “Cleaning the Internet.”

Residents of Tianjin, China are reporting on social media the emergence of a strange foam throughout its streets following the first rainfall since a massive chemical explosion destroyed much of the city. Chinese officials are claiming the foam is safe, while announcing that at least ten corporate executives are being “controlled” for an investigation into the blast.

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The Chinese government has ramped up censorship operations in light of the massive chemical explosion in Tianjin, publishing a report in which they accuse fifty websites of “creating panic” by “publishing unverified information” about the nature of the blast and the company storing the chemicals that exploded.

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The Chinese government is censoring media and citizen coverage of the deadly explosion in Tianjin. Reports are circulating of Weibo accounts critical of Chinese media being shut down, and CNN’s Will Ripley was forced off the air by angry alleged relatives of victims.

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Video and photographs of a massive explosion in Tianjin, China, have begun surfacing on Twitter, Sina Weibo, and other social media sites as authorities scramble to find the cause of the explosion and those caught in proximity to the fire, whose cause appears still unknown.