Protests over China’s strict lockdown policies

A PROTEST against China’s strict “zero-covid” policies resurfaced in Shanghai on Sunday afternoon despite police clearing away hundreds of demonstrators with force and pepper spray in the morning.

Crowds stood and filmed as officers shoved people who had gathered in the street and shouted “We don’t want PCR tests, we want freedom!”, according to a witness.

People have been staging protests across China, where street demonstrations are extremely rare, since Friday, but anger and frustration flared over a number of deaths in a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi that the public believe were due to excessive lockdown measures delaying rescue.

A crowdsourced list on social media showed there were demonstrations at 50 universities. Video posts said to have been filmed in Nanjing in the east, Guangzhou in the south and at least five other cities showed protesters tussling with police in white protective suits or dismantling barricades used to seal off neighbourhoods. The Associated Press could not independently verify all the protests.

Some of the most shared videos came from Shanghai, which suffered a devastating lockdown in spring in which people struggled to secure groceries and medicines and were forcefully taken into centralised quarantine.

In the early hours of Sunday, standing on the road named after a city in Xinjiang where at least 10 people died in the apartment fire, protesters chanted “Xi Jinping! Step down! CCP! Step down.”

After three years of harsh lockdowns that have left people confined in their homes for weeks, the Xinjiang fire appears to have broken through the Chinese public’s ability to tolerate harsh measures.

One protester said he saw multiple people being taken away, forced into vans by police.