China stamps out protests
CHINESE security forces detained people and appeared to prevent a planned protest yesterday as authorities worked to stamp out widening dissent seeking political freedoms and an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.
People have taken to the streets in major cities and gathered at university campuses across China in a wave of protests not seen since pro-democracy rallies in 1989 were crushed.
A deadly fire last week in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, was the catalyst for the public anger, with many blaming Covid-19 lockdowns for hampering rescue efforts. Beijing accused “forces with ulterior motives” for linking the fire to Covid measures, saying local authorities had “made clear the facts and refuted this information and smears”.
At an area in the economic hub of Shanghai where demonstrators gathered at the weekend, police led three people away. China’s censors also worked to scrub signs of the social media-driven rallies. A planned protest in the capital Beijing yesterday came to nothing as several dozen police officers and vans choked a crossroad near the assembly point.
Police vehicles lined the road to nearby Sitong Bridge, where a lone protester hung banners last month denouncing President Xi Jinping before being detained. Demonstrators had planned to march to the bridge following a successful rally the day before near the Liangma river.
In Hong Kong, where mass democracy protests erupted in 2019, dozens gathered at the Chinese University to mourn the victims of the Urumqi fire, a witness said. People also displayed banners and held flowers in the financial hub’s Central district. Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the city after the 2019 protests.
Protesters have notably used the rallies to call for greater freedoms. Some have even demanded the resignation of President Xi, recently reappointed to a historic third term as China’s leader.
Large crowds gathered Sunday in Beijing and Shanghai, where police clashed with protesters as they tried to stop groups converging at Wulumuqi street, named after the Mandarin for Urumqi. Hundreds of people rallied in the same area with blank sheets of paper and flowers in an apparent silent protest on Sunday afternoon.
The BBC said one of its journalists had been arrested and beaten by police while covering the Shanghai protests, although China’s foreign ministry said the reporter had not identified himself as such. A British government minister denounced the Chinese police’s actions as “unacceptable” yesterday.
In Beijing, at least 400 people gathered on the banks of the Liangma for several hours. Journalists at the tense scene of the Shanghai protests yesterday saw a heavy police presence, with blue fences in place along the pavements to stop further gatherings.
Three people were then detained by police at the site, with law enforcement preventing passers-by from taking photos or video of the area.
Shanghai police did not respond to enquiries about how many people had been held. China’s strict control of information and continued travel curbs tied to the zero-Covid policy make verifying numbers of protesters across the vast country challenging.
But such widespread rallies are exceptionally rare, with authorities harshly clamping down on all opposition to the central government.
Spreading through social media, the protests have been fuelled by frustration at the central government’s virus policy, under which authorities impose snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and mass testing campaigns over just a handful of cases.
Protests also occurred on Sunday in Wuhan, where Covid-19 first emerged, while there were reports of demonstrations in Guangzhou and Chengdu.
At the scene of the Beijing riverside rally, where rows of police vehicles were in place yesterday, a jogger in her twenties said she had seen the protests on social media.
“This protest was a good thing, it sent the signal that people were fed up with too strong restrictions,” said the jogger, who asked not to be identified.
State-run newspaper the People’s Daily published a commentary yesterday warning against “paralysis” and “battle-weariness” in the fight against Covid, but stopped far short of calling for an end to the hardline policy.
“People have now reached a boiling point because there has been no clear path to end the zero-Covid policy,” Alfred Wu Muluan, a Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore, said. “The party has underestimated the people’s anger.”
China reported 40 052 domestic Covid-19 cases yesterday, a record high but tiny compared to caseloads in the West at the height of the pandemic.