After fire with 10 deaths: Anti-government protests in China due to Corona policy Switzerland is already participating in UN Security Council talks

As heard on online videos, the protesters chanted, among other things: “Down with the communist party! Down with Xi Jinping!».

According to the recordings, several people were taken away by the police. Such open protests are extremely unusual in the authoritarian People’s Republic of more than 1.4 billion inhabitants.

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 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.

China is currently experiencing the highest corona figures since the start of the pandemic. On Sunday, the Health Commission in Beijing reported more than 39,000 new cases for the fourth day in a row, a record high. 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. (sda/dpa)