China COVID protests die down, but policy resentment remains

Bill was standing with a group of people mostly in their 20s when a young woman started to lead the chanting. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” she shouted, her voice cracking at one point.

Political security' is a key concern of China's leadership and security services [Thomas Peter/Reuters]

Others followed her lead, repeating the chant, and raising sheets of blank paper, a defining symbol of the latest wave of protests in China.

“I had tears in my eyes,” said Bill, a 24-year-old graduate student in Chengdu who, like all the other people interviewed for this story, asked to be identified by a pseudonym for fear of retribution. “Hearing those people chanting these words, in China of all the places, makes me feel that I have never been alone.”

“If all of us can be this brave, then this country will still have hope,” he added.

In a rare nationwide display of defiance, protests calling for an end to China’s harsh zero-COVID policy erupted over the weekend in several major cities, including Shanghai and Beijing, and on campuses of dozens of universities, creating one of the biggest political challenges to the government since the unrest in Hong Kong in 2019.

The demonstrations began after a fire in a high-rise apartment building in Xinjiang’s Urumqi last Friday that left at least 10 people dead; protesters blame the deaths on the strict measures linked to the government’s zero-COVID policies. Videos posted online showed that the barriers erected in front of the neighbourhood compound, as part of the city’s prolonged coronavirus lockdown, hampered the firefighters’ access to the building.

Blank sheets of paper, representing censorship and what is not allowed to be said, have emerged as a unifying element of the protests across China [Thomas Peter/Reuters]

The outpouring of anger, at a level rarely seen in China’s tightly controlled society, consumed Chinese social media. In post after post on Weibo and WeChat, two of China’s biggest social media platforms, people demanded justice for the victims and that the government drop zero-COVID, which has slowed down the economy and upended millions of people’s lives.

“WeChat felt like a war that night,” Su, a freelance writer based in Shanghai, wrote on the platform. “Almost every minute, someone writes or reposts something that would normally be deemed too sensitive to share.”

The censors, as expected, scrambled to delete posts. Trending topics referencing the Urumqi fire, for example, were dragged down the Weibo trending list, but the sheer volume of discussion happening online took many platforms by surprise and many posts continued to circulate.Read More on..