China's Covid frustration: The biggest protests since 1989, how dangerous will it be for Xi Jinping?
Created: 11/28/2022, 5:34 p.m
By: Christiane Kuehl
White paper as a symbol of censorship: Anti-Covid protest in Beijing © Noel Celis/afp
"Down with Xi Jinping": China experienced its biggest wave of protests in more than 30 years over the weekend over its zero-Covid policy.
An expert sees a new quality in the networked protests.
Shanghai/Frankfurt - The morning after the anti-Covid protests on busy Urumqi Road in Shanghai, it's raining and police officers are standing on the corners.
They ask passers-by not to take photos – but some still take pictures of the street, where there are still blue lockdown fences on the sidewalk.
There was also tense calm in Beijing on Monday;
Because of the current quasi-lockdown, there are hardly any cars on the road anyway.
There were hardly any videos of new protests circulating on the WeChat chat platform on Monday.
According to residents, the rumor mill is cooking for this.
In about a dozen cities, people had taken to the streets over the weekend, with several hundred or even over a thousand participants, and they had shared videos of it across the country.
It shows people breaking down lockdown barriers and confronting police officers in white hazmat suits.
Others hold blank sheets of paper in their hands – an allusion to the censorship that has since spread like wildfire on the internet.
On the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, where President Xi Jinping studied, students chanted calls for democracy and freedom of speech and sang the socialist "International".
On Saturday night, on Urumqi Street in Shanghai, some went even further, demanding "Down with Xi Jinping!" and "Down with the Communist Party!"
The fire in a residential building in Urumqi could not be extinguished in time.
Too many cars blocked the access for the ambulance.
They had been there for weeks because of the ongoing corona lockdown.
© Uncredited/dpa
China's zero-Covid policy was at the root of the anger.
But the spark that ignited the cauldron was a fire in Urumqi that killed ten people - which is why the protests also started on Urumqi Road in Shanghai, named after the capital of the north-western Xinjiang region.
The Covid measures would have prevented faster extinguishing work and the rescue of people there, criticized users on social media.
The cars that have been parked in the narrow alley in front of the house for weeks due to the curfews would have blocked access for the emergency services.
Many of the protests therefore began as funeral marches with candles.
In addition, many feared that they themselves could be trapped behind lockdown fences like the victims of Urumqi.
China is the last major economy to have a very strict zero-Covid policy.
Even small corona outbreaks can lead to lockdowns, even entire cities and business closures, which puts a massive strain on the economy and people's everyday lives.
But the daily new infections with the highly contagious omicron variant are currently increasing like never before: According to the authorities, their number reached a new high of 40,052 cases nationwide on Monday.
The biggest protests since 1989, how dangerous will it be for Xi Jinping?
Some observers are already talking about the biggest protests since the bloody crackdown on the democracy movement in 1989. The police initially reacted cautiously over the weekend, but eventually used pepper spray to break up the protest groups.
Some demonstrators were taken away, as was a BBC correspondent who, according to the British broadcaster, was beaten.
In view of the calm on Monday, many questions now arise: Did the police and state apparatus nip the burgeoning wave of protests in the bud?
Or did people simply want to let off steam at the weekend - and are now going about their usual business?
Or were the protests just the start of a new round?
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"What is happening now is new, interesting and potentially quite important," says William Hurst, professor of China's development at Cambridge University.
"However, we have to be careful with conclusions or predictions." There have been protests in China for decades, Hurst said.
People are protesting against mass layoffs, low grain prices, local corruption, Hurst wrote on Twitter.
Rarer are student demonstrations, movements of urban elites for political reforms or ethnically influenced protests by Tibetans or Uyghurs, for example.
What they all have in common, says Hurst, is that they were local and not nationally networked.
"Therefore, what is particularly new is that the demonstrators have now taken to the streets in several cities and obviously knew what is happening in other parts of the country.
China after protests: Censors are erasing every trace from the internet
In any case, the censors had done a great job on Monday.
Videos of the protests and search terms for central protest locations such as “Liangma River” in Beijing and “Urumqi Road” in Shanghai could no longer be found on China's social media.
As so often in China, users immediately found detours.
Messages circulated on WeChat or Twitter that showed the blank sheet shown on the demos.
China's state media is meanwhile silent about the protests in the usual manner.
So it's almost surprising that the state newspaper
People's Daily
published an op-ed on Monday morning warning of "paralysis" and "battle fatigue" in the fight against the corona pandemic - without calling for an end to the rigid policy, of course.
"We don't want PCR tests, we want freedom!" Many demonstrators shouted at the weekend.
"We want to live like humans!" So did Xi Jinping misjudge it?
Do the demonstrators perhaps even have allies in parts of the political elite, as some rumors have it?
Will the state relax the measures - or maybe at least start a real vaccination campaign?
The coming weeks will show that.
After all, the authorities have relaxed some corona measures.
The city government in Beijing announced that it would no longer put up fences to block access to residential complexes with corona cases.
"The passages must remain free for medical transport, escape and rescue," said an official responsible for disease control.
The authorities mentioned neither the fire in Urumqi nor the protests.
