Shanghai Covid crackdown

Shanghai authorities put up barriers on Monday around a CBD where hundreds had protested over the weekend against heavy Covid-19 measures.

Late on Sunday protesters clashed with police, with security forces taking away a busload of people. By Monday, police pairs were patrolling in high-visibility vests while police cars and motorbikes cruised by. From the streets of Shanghai to Beijing campuses, the civil disobedience was unprecedented in Xi Jinping’s regime.

““We want to live a normal life,” said Shi, 28, at a candlelight vigil in Beijing on Sunday.

“We should all bravely express our feelings.”

The catalyst for the protests was an apartment fire last week in the western city of Urumqi that killed 10 people.

Some speculated that Covid curbs in the city had hindered rescue and escape.

Over the weekend, protesters in cities including Wuhan and Lanzhou overturned Covid testing facilities, while students gathered on campuses across China.

Early on Sunday in Shanghai, some protesters briefly chanted anti-xi slogans, almost unheard of in a country where Xi has a level of power unseen since Mao Zedong’s era.

The backlash against Covid restrictions is a setback for China’s efforts to eradicate the virus, which is infecting record numbers of people and raising concern about the economic toll of lockdowns on the world’s second-largest economy.

The protests roiled global markets on Monday, sending oil prices lower and the dollar higher, with Chinese stocks and the yuan falling sharply.

China remains the only major country not treating Covid as endemic, imposing arduous restrictions on the lives of hundreds of millions.

China has not approved any Western-made Covid shots and a Hong Kong study late last year found that its Sinovac shot did not produce adequate levels of antibodies to fight the Omicron variant.