After large weekend protests in China, in which tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the regime’s harsh restrictions against the coronavirus, a huge deployment of police and law enforcement by the regime between Monday evening and Tuesday morning effectively prevented new demonstrations from being held.
All the cities where there were major protests on Saturday and Sunday evenings on Monday remained relatively calm, mainly because the Communist Party of China regime mobilized huge numbers of policemen. In some cases, such as in Shanghai, the police have blocked the streets with physical barriers and closed the subway stops; in others, such as Beijing, the police carried out very strict checks on passers-by in areas where protests had been held in the days before, forcing people to show the contents of their phones.
Police arrested several peopleaccording to information obtained from the international media, although it is impossible to have a reliable estimate of how many.
As a result, the protests were all but stifled on Monday evening. Some protesters tried to gather in Hangzhou, a city in southeast China, but they were quickly pinned down and arrested.
There have been demonstrations of solidarity in Hong Kong, but even those were attended by a few dozen people: Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous Chinese city where, in theory, citizens would enjoy greater civil liberties; in reality for some years now the Chinese regime has also implemented the systematic violations of the rights in force in the rest of China in the city.
Together with the repression, the regime is trying to at least partially meet the demands of the protesters by making small and well-defined concessions. The zero COVID strategy, which underpins the lockdowns and continued restrictions that still remain in China, will not be eliminated and has indeed been vindicated by state media. But locally, the regime has eased some restrictions: for example, in some universities, students have been allowed to go home after days (and in some cases weeks) of lockdown on campus. Mass testing requirements have been eased in Guangzhou. In Beijing, on the other hand, the local government has announced that it will no longer forcibly lock people into their homes, preventing them from going out.
The protests began after rumors spread that in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, ten people had died in a fire in a building from which they had not been able to escape due to restrictions, because the authorities had locked them inside the house preventing them from leaving. The authorities have denied this version, but the news had nevertheless added to a discontent that has been very strong for months throughout China.
