On Sunday, many Chinese regions saw demonstrations against the authorities’ “zero Covid” policy, which calls for the strict closure of areas with rising Corona virus infection rates. Thousands of people attended these protests and some of them chanted anti-regime slogans, sometimes going so far as to call on President Xi Jinping to step down.
Thousands of Chinese Sunday attended Demonstrations took place in Beijing and Shanghai And in Wuhan and other cities in China they have refused to close. And in a rare protest against President Xi Jinping’s government and policies.Zero covidAfter the strict measures it has imposed for nearly three years, some protesters chanted anti-regime slogans.
Hong Kong’s stock market fell more than 3% on Monday after demonstrations across mainland China protested Beijing’s strict “zero Covid” policy.
From sudden, widespread and long-lasting restrictions on the detection of any infection, to the systematic quarantine of close contacts in the camps, to the almost daily requirement of negative virus tests in order to access public places, these are all measures that anger the Chinese people. The discontent is fueled by several well-publicized cases of delays in the arrival of emergency health services due to the restrictions in place, with deadly consequences.
A fire killed ten people on Thursday in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang (northwest), and has increased grievances. Several posts posted on social media considered that the measures taken to deal with Covid have exacerbated this tragedy, as there have been cars parked for weeks due to closure in the small, narrow neighborhood leading up to the burning building, which prevented the arrival of help.
Call for Xi Jinping’s resignation
Police trying to remove people from the site of an earlier demonstration clashed with groups of protesters Sunday evening in central Shanghai, a city whose population of 25 million was placed under a grueling two-month lockdown at the start of the year, an AFP correspondent reported.
A crowd gathered earlier in the day, and a video widely circulated on the Internet showed protesters at a location geolocated by AFP on Wulumuqi (Urumqi) Street in central Shanghai, chanting “Xi Jinping, get up!” a rare expression. to the president and the regime in the economic capital of the country.
Police dispersed the protesters in the morning, then hundreds of people gathered in the same area in the afternoon, a witness told AFP.
Hundreds of people demonstrated quietly in central Shanghai on Sunday afternoon, carrying white papers, in a move that has become a symbol of protest against censorship in China, and white roses at a number of road junctions, before police arrived and dispersed, according to a witness who asked not to be identified.
Other videos, apparently shot in the afternoon, showed crowds chanting.
Hundreds of protesters in Wuhan
In the evening, dozens of policemen took sides and closed the streets where the demonstrations took place. They asked people to leave the site, but some insisted on staying and the AFP correspondent witnessed several people being arrested.
Then more police arrived.
In a live broadcast on Instagram, images showed members of the security forces accosting a group and forcing them back onto the sidewalks.
A foreigner who declined to be named said: “It appears that the police are looking for people suspected of leading the demonstrations.”
“The atmosphere was very tense, but there was also enthusiasm. The protesters vented their anger on the police and the (communist) party,” he added.
Between 300 and 400 people gathered for several hours on the riverside in Beijing on Sunday night, some of them chanting, “We are all Xinjiang people! Come on, Chinese people,” according to AFP reporters present. on the scene .
Protesters sang the national anthem and listened to speeches, while police cars waited across the river.
Hundreds demonstrated on Sunday evening in Wuhan, central China, to protest health restrictions. And live video on social media, verified by the French news agency, showed a crowd of angry residents gathering in this city, where the first Corona virus infection was discovered in December 2019.
University students demonstrate
Between 200 and 300 students from the prestigious Tsinghua University demonstrated in Beijing on Sunday, according to a witness told AFP and photos posted on social media.
The witness said that at 11:30 (03:30 GMT), a female student started showing a blank piece of paper and other women joined her.
Al-Shahed added: “We sang the national anthem and the international anthem, and we sang freedom will triumph, no to ‘PCR’ tests. We want food, not closure, we want freedom.”
Videos circulated on the Internet show a crowd in front of the university restaurant, gathering around a speaker shouting: “It’s not a normal life, we’re fed up, our life wasn’t like this before!”
And another video that appears to have been filmed on the same site shows students chanting “democracy and the rule of law, freedom of expression,” but was quickly removed from the internet.
A vigil was also held at Peking University, adjacent to Tsinghua University, to honor the victims of the Urumqi fire. Protesters began gathering around midnight Saturday night inside the university campus, and the crowd numbered between 100 and 200 people, according to one of the student participants.
“I’ve heard people shouting ‘No to Covid tests, yes to freedom’,” he said, showing AFP photos and videos to confirm his words.
Video clips on social networks showed a huge protest at the Nanjing Communication Institute (east) and small rallies in Xi’an, Wuhan (central) and Guangzhou (south), but the French news agency was not in able to verify the authenticity of these images.
Protest-related hashtags have been banned on Weibo, and sensitive videos have been removed from Chinese websites.
China’s strict anti-COVID-19 policy is causing growing dissatisfaction. Sporadic demonstrations, some of them violent, have taken place in several cities in recent days, including at the world’s largest iPhone factory located in central Zhengzhou and owned by Taiwanese giant Foxconn.
Despite the many vaccines available, and unlike other countries in the world, China still imposes isolation measures as soon as the infections appear, including quarantine for those infected with the disease in the centres, and almost daily “BCR” tests to enter the public places.
And China recorded 36,506 cases of Covid on Sunday, a record number since the start of the pandemic, although this number is small for a country like China, which has 1.4 billion people.
And the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announced on Sunday that one of its correspondents in China who was covering protests in Shanghai against the strict “zero Covid” policy had been arrested and “beaten up by police”.
“The BBC is very concerned about the treatment of journalist Ed Lawrence, who was arrested and handcuffed while covering protests in Shanghai,” a spokesman for the group said in a statement received by Agence France-Presse. He explained that the BBC has not received “any official explanation or apology from the Chinese authorities”.
About 4,000 cases of Covid-19 in Beijing
Meanwhile, Beijing’s local government said on Monday that the city reported 840 new locally infected COVID-19 cases with symptoms and 3,048 asymptomatic cases on Sunday.
The previous day, 747 symptomatic and 3,560 asymptomatic cases were recorded.
Authorities said 474 injuries were recorded outside the quarantine areas on Sunday.
On Monday, the Shanghai city government announced that it had registered 16 new local cases of coronavirus with symptoms on Sunday, up from 11 a day earlier, while 128 local cases with no symptoms were registered, up from 119 a day earlier.
Four injuries were recorded outside the quarantine areas, which is the same number of injuries recorded the previous day.
Shanghai reported no COVID-19-related deaths on Sunday, unchanged from the previous day.
FRANCE 24/AFP/Reuters
