More protests over strict lockdown rules in China
APROTEST against China’s strict “zero-Covid” policies resurfaced in Shanghai yesterday, 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 quarantine.
In the early hours of yesterday, 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.”
One member of the crowd confirmed that people did shout for the removal of Xi Jinping, China’s leader – words many would never have thought would be said in one of China’s biggest cities.
Hundreds of protesters had gathered along a street in Shanghai, starting at around midnight on Saturday.
They split into two different sections of Middle Urumqi Road. One group was calm and took candles, flowers and signs honouring those who died in the apartment fire. The other was more active, shouting slogans and singing the national anthem. People called for an official apology for deaths in the Urumqi fire. Others discussed the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in which the ruling Communist Party had ordered troops to fire on student protesters. One ethnic Uighur individual shared his experiences of discrimination and police violence.
“Everyone thinks that Chinese people are afraid to come out and protest, that they don’t have any courage,” said the protester, who said it was his first time demonstrating. “Actually in my heart, I also thought of this. But then when I went there, I found that the environment was such that everyone was very brave.”
At first the scene was peaceful, but at around 3am it turned violent.
Police started surrounding the protesters and broke up the first more active group before going for the second, calmer one. The goal was to move people off the main street.
A protester who gave only his family name, Zhao, said one of his friends was beaten by police and two were pepper-sprayed. He said police stamped on his feet as he tried to stop them from taking his friend away. Zhao said protesters yelled slogans including “(We) do not want PCR (tests), but want freedom”, in reference to a protest staged by a lone man in Beijing ahead of the 20th Communist Party congress in the capital in October.
After three years of harsh lockdowns that have left people confined in their homes for weeks at a time, the Xinjiang fire appears to have finally broken through the Chinese public’s ability to tolerate the harsh measures.