Beijing warns of crackdown
Chinese authorities warned of a sweeping crackdown on ‘‘zero covid’’ protesters and security forces conducted random spotchecks on the streets of major cities, amid widespread confusion over whether Beijing was making a serious attempt to relax its harshest coronavirus measures.
Communist Party leaders, who had otherwise avoided directly mentioning the mass rallies challenging their zero Covid policy, said for the first time that they would ‘‘resolutely crack down’’ on the demonstrations.
Chen Wenqing, a former intelligence officer who is head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body for law enforcement policy, said on Tuesday that authorities would act against ‘‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces as well as on illegal or criminal acts that disrupt social order’’.
Protests across major cities began last week after a deadly blaze in the far northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Many Chinese think the tragedy was worsened because first responders were slowed by distancing measures; local authorities deny the allegations. But three years of living with draconian lockdowns, mass testing and the risk of being sent to spartan centralised quarantine facilities sent many to the edge, triggering extremely rare national demonstrations that
occasionally called for the ouster of the Communist Party.
Chen’s warning, coupled with the detention of suspected protesters and a ramped-up police presence in major cities, came as demonstrations largely fizzled out on Monday and Tuesday.
One notable exception seemed to occur in the southern economic hub of Guangzhou. Video that circulated widely on social media showed a group of protesters throwing what seemed to be glass bottles at hazmat-suitclad security officers holding
shields. Storyful, which verifies online content for news organisations worldwide, said that the clip was filmed on Tuesday in Guangzhou.
Tweets that accompanied the video said that it was shot in Haizhu, a district that has been the centre of the city’s latest virus outbreak.
Two people in Shanghai told The Washington Post that their colleagues and loved ones were interrogated by police early this week after joining weekend protests against the zero Covid
policy, which also served as a vigil for the 10 people who died in the Xinjiang fire.
One demonstrator was held incommunicado for 24 hours from Monday to early Tuesday, as family and colleagues frantically searched for him. He was released from a police station early Tuesday, said a co-worker, also named Chen, who attended the protests with him.
Yang, a 27-year-old who attended a weekend rally in the resort town of Dali, where people marched on downtown streets and sang protest anthem ‘‘The Internationale,’’ said he was visited by police officers at home. Three of his friends, students at a local university, were told by their school to provide written accounts of their activities on threat of expulsion.
‘‘For me, it was just verbal warning from the police,’’ he said. ‘‘I told them I’m a real patriot and I did everything only because I wanted my country to get better.’’
The people spoke to The Post on the condition that only their last names be used out of fear of reprisal.
In Beijing and Shanghai, police checked the phones of people in the vicinity of protest sites for the messaging app Telegram and virtual private networks, according to a WeChat post Wednesday by Qu Weiguo, an English-language professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. Demonstrators had used these internet services to avoid censors and get around China’s ‘‘Great Firewall’’. Qu’s post appeared to have been removed by censors within an hour of publication.
China tightened its already rigid censorship regime after a major Communist Party meeting last month. Under regulations that take effect on December 15, users who repost or merely like a post that authorities deem harmful could face penalties such as account suspension, although it’s unclear how that would be implemented. Access to superapps such as WeChat, which have functions beyond social networking, is seen as essential for daily urban life in China.