Hundreds of people took to the streets on Sunday in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other cities across China to protest the exaggerated lockdowns, a rare display of hostility towards President Xi Jinping’s regime and his practiced “zero Covid” policies for almost three years.
Unforeseen, massive and endless confinements to the discovery of the slightest case, systematic quarantine of contact cases in the fields and negative PCR tests required almost daily to gain access to public space are increasingly exasperating the Chinese population.
Discontent fueled by several high-profile cases in which the emergency services were allegedly slowed down in their interventions by health restrictions, with fatal consequences.
A fire that killed ten people on Thursday in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang (northwest) province, has exacerbated those grievances.
The authors of many messages circulated on social media claimed that the measures taken against Covid had aggravated this drama, cars parked for weeks for imprisonment in the narrow alley leading to the burning building having hindered the arrival of help.
– “Xi Jinping steps down!” –
On Sunday evening, police trying to remove people from the site of a previous demonstration clashed with groups of protesters in central Shanghai, a megacity whose 25 million inhabitants lived at the beginning of the year for two months in grueling isolation, noted an AFP reporter.
A crowd had gathered on Wulumuqi Street (Urumqi in Mandarin) earlier in the day and a video widely circulated on social media and geotagged by AFP showed protesters chanting “Xi Jinping, get out! CCP (Communist Party of China, ed.) , withdraw!” .
Police dispersed the protesters in the morning, but by the afternoon hundreds of people had gathered in the same area, an eyewitness told AFP.
Protesters carrying white pieces of paper symbolizing censorship and white flowers stood silently at several intersections, he said, on condition of anonymity.
Videos posted on social media in the area that appeared to have been filmed in the late afternoon showed crowds chanting slogans.
In footage taken from different angles, a man with a bouquet of yellow flowers in his hand could be seen being dragged towards a police car, as onlookers screamed.
– Hundreds of protesters in Wuhan –
In the evening, dozens of policemen in yellow vests formed a dense line, marking off the streets where the demonstrations had taken place.
Their colleagues asked people to leave the place, but some still crowded and AFP witnessed the arrest of several people.
More police arrived later.
Live on Instagram, footage showed law enforcement approaching a group from both sides of the street and forcing them back onto the sidewalks.
“It appeared that the police were looking for people suspected of leading the protests,” said a foreigner who wished to remain anonymous.
“L’atmosphère était très tendue, mais il y avait aussi de l’excitation et de l’énergie (…). Les demonstrants ont dirigé leur colère contre la police et le parti (communiste), reprenant le refrain ‘retirez- you !’ of the last days”.
On Sunday evening, between 300 and 400 people gathered for several hours on the banks of a river in Beijing, some shouting: “We are all Xinjiang people! Come on Chinese!” AFP reporters at the scene said.
Protesters sang the national anthem and listened to speeches, while across the river a line of police cars waited.
Hundreds of people also marched in the streets of Wuhan, central China, against health restrictions, nearly three years since the world’s first case of Covid-19 was detected in this city, according to live video on social networks and geolocated by AFP.
– Unrest in the universities –
Between 200 and 300 students at the capital’s prestigious Tsinghua University also protested on their campus the same day, a witness interviewed by AFP said.
She said around 11:30 (0330 GMT), a student started brandishing a blank sheet of paper and was joined by other women.
“We sang the national anthem and the international anthem and chanted: + freedom will triumph +, + no PCR test, we want food +, + no to childbirth, we want freedom +”, this witness said again.
On the internet, videos showed a crowd outside the university cafeteria, gathered around a speaker shouting: “This is not a normal life, we’ve had enough. Our lives weren’t like this before!”
Another video showing students shouting “democracy and the rule of law, freedom of speech” was quickly removed from the internet.
During the night between Saturday and Sunday, a vigil was also held in memory of the victims of the Urumqi fire at Peking University, close to Tsinghua University.
According to a student who attended, protesters began gathering around midnight on Saturday night on campus, and the crowds numbered between 100 and 200 people.
“I heard shouts: + no to Covid tests, yes to freedom +!”, He underlined, presenting photos and videos to AFP to confirm his statements.
Videos on social networks also showed a large vigil at the Nanjing Communications Institute (east), as well as smaller gatherings in Xian (central) and Guangzhou (south), but the authenticity of these images has not been verified by AFP .
Hashtags related to these events were censored on the Weibo platform, and sensitive videos were deleted from sharing sites Duoyin and Kuaishou.
Sporadic and sometimes violent protests had already taken place in China in recent days, most notably at the world’s largest iPhone factory located in Zhengzhou (center), as well as in Urumqi after the disaster.
39,506 cases of Covid were registered in China on Sunday, a daily record but a figure that remains very low compared to those recorded in the rest of the world at the height of the pandemic.
