Protests erupted in cities and campuses across China. Frustrated and outraged citizens took to the streets in a rare wave of demonstrations against the government's "zero covid" policy.
Residents of Shanghai, China's most populous city, gathered last night and this morning to call for an end to pandemic-related lockdowns, chanting: "We want freedom”, “Unblock Xinjiang, unblock all of China”, “Xi Jinping, step down!”, “Communist Party, step down!”
The demonstrations, according to witnesses heard by the WP, were dispersed by the police, following fierce clashes. Many were arrested. The demonstrators, dispersed around five this morning, raised white papers in protest against the censorship imposed by the regime.
The spark that ignited the demonstrations was a deadly fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in far northwest China. Last Thursday ten people, including three children, died after firefighters were unable to get close enough to an apartment building engulfed in flames due to anticovid measures that would have hindered rescue efforts.
Officials on Friday denied that the covid restrictions were to blame and said that "it was difficult to save those civilians", thus fueling the anger of the citizens of the city of Urumqi who, via social media, decided to go square.
Afterwards, residents of Shanghai and students of the universities of Nanjing and Xi'an gathered for a vigil in honor of the victims. After the vigil, the clashes began.
The Urumqi fire follows a bus crash last September that killed 27 people as they were being transported to a quarantine center. Last April, an unannounced lockdown in Shanghai left residents without enough food. A 3-year-old boy, on the other hand, died because his parents were unable to take him to hospital due to restrictions.
Health authorities say the strategy of stopping covid transmission as soon as possible and quarantining all positive cases is the only way to prevent a new wave of deaths.
China's population of 1,4 billion has a low level of natural immunity. Those who were immunized received domestically produced vaccines that proved less effective against the less lethal but more infectious omicron variant.