The fire in Urumqi may have sparked the protests, but events in recent months laid the kindling. In September, a bus transporting residents to a distant coronavirus quarantine facility crashed, killing 27 people. Later in October, workers at an iPhone factory in Zhengzhou began to flee by foot after the site was put under lockdown, leading to violent clashes with local authorities.
There have been protests against the zero-Covid policy in the past, but never this bold. In the build-up to the Communist Party Congress in October, banners calling for lockdowns to end were put up across a bridge in Beijing. The protester who put them there has not been seen since being taken away by authorities.
But at the demonstrations over the weekend, the demands were more political than material, CNN's Nectar Gan writes. "Give me liberty or give me death!" hundreds were heard to chant in cities across the country. Many of the protests were concentrated in university campuses -- which are particularly politically sensitive to the Communist Party, given the history of the student-led Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989. In one video, a university official could be heard warning the students: "You will pay for what you did today." A student shouted in reply: "You too, and so will the country."
The protests may have been fueled by the sight of unmasked fans at the World Cup in Qatar. As tens of thousands pour into stadiums to cheer on their teams, Chinese citizens can only watch from their apartment blocks. One WeChat article asked, "Are they not living on the same planet as us?"
So far, China's vast security apparatus has moved swiftly to smother the protests, with police patrolling streets and checking cell phones.
Beyond reasserting control of the streets, it is unclear where Xi goes from here. The central government has tried to shift the blame onto local officials, but the problems remain.
While the protests appear to have peaked for the time being, Covid cases are rising -- and have reached record levels last week. Restrictions will likely have to be ramped up to contain this latest wave, which may lead to further discontent.
Boosting the country's low vaccination rates -- especially among the elderly -- may offer a way out, but China has so far refused to import mRNA vaccines, and there are questions about the efficacy of its own shots.
Xi is stuck. He has invested huge amounts of capital -- both political and economic -- in this strategy. Turning back now would be something of an embarrassment. What's more, zero-Covid has come to be suffused with a sense of national pride.
Earlier in the pandemic, it was easy to paint Western governments as cruelly allowing millions to die for the sake of their economies, while China benevolently shielded its population from the disease. But as China braces for its fourth winter of restrictions, many in the country are now questioning how benevolent this approach really is.
IN OTHER NEWS
- Many of the protests in China were filmed and the videos then posted to Twitter. But, for many, finding this footage was not easy. Twitter searches for the protests returned a flood of spam, pornography and gibberish that some disinformation researchers say appear to be a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government or its allies to drown out images of the demonstrations. Many of the tweets reviewed by CNN came from accounts that had been created months ago, follow virtually no other accounts and have no followers of their own -- suggesting they were spam accounts.
- Finding reliable information about Covid on Twitter has become more difficult after the company revealed last week it would no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy. In 2020, Twitter developed an extensive set of rules aiming to ban "harmful misinformation" about the virus and vaccines. Some 11,000 accounts were suspended for breaking these rules. But these may now be set to be reinstated. Curiously, Twitter did not appear to formally announce the rule change -- but simply posted a note on its website.
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