Dramatic events on Sunday night in China. People have taken to the streets in cities across the country to protest the government’s strict zero-Covid policy.
Videos show protesters calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, 69, for the first time ever in China. At the most recent party congress, Xi practically declared himself president for life.
In Shanghai, the main economic center of the country, people chant ‘Down with the Party! Down with Xi Jinping!” The People’s Republic has never seen such protests. Open resentment is extremely rare in the authoritarian country of more than 1.4 billion people – and is usually punished harshly.
Security forces hold back
Security forces initially seem to passively tolerate what is happening. There are reports of individual arrests. Photos show several people being taken away by police in Shanghai.
The demonstrations were provoked on Thursday evening by an apartment fire in the northwestern Chinese city of Urumqi, which killed at least ten people and injured nine others. A number of local residents criticized on social networks that the strict corona measures had made fighting the fire more difficult. Residents had been made more difficult to escape through locked apartment doors. The city of 3.5 million inhabitants had previously been in lockdown for more than three months.
Since then, there have been angry protests against the strict corona measures in various parts of the country. In the capital Beijing, residents in several neighborhoods also broke through the fences of their residential complexes and demanded an end to the lockdowns.
Highest corona numbers since the start of the pandemic
China is currently experiencing the highest corona figures since the start of the pandemic. On Sunday, the Beijing Health Commission reported a record number of more than 39,000 new cases for the fourth day in a row. Far-reaching restrictions apply in cities with more than a million inhabitants, such as Beijing, the heavily affected southern Chinese city of Guangzhou or Chongqing.
While the rest of the world has long lived with the virus, China is sticking to its strict zero-Covid strategy. In individual cases, residential areas are cordoned off. Contacts come to quarantine camps. Infected people are isolated in the hospital. Even after nearly three years of the pandemic, China’s international borders are largely closed. (kes/SDA)