SHANGHAI\/BEIJING
\nHundreds of demonstrators in Shanghai shouted and jostled with police on Sunday evening as protests over China\u2019s stringent COVID restrictions flared for a third day following a deadly factory fire in the country\u2019s far west.
\nThe wave of civil disobedience, which has spread to other cities including Beijing, is unprecedented in mainland China since President Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago and comes amid mounting frustration over his signature zero-COVID policy.
\nChina has spent nearly three years living with some of the strictest COVID curbs in the world.
\nThe fire in the city of Urumqi triggered protests after videos of the incident posted on social media led to accusations that lockdown were a factor in the death toll.
\nUrumqi officials abruptly held a news conference in the early hours of Saturday to deny COVID measures had hampered escape and rescue. Many of Urumqi\u2019s 4 million residents have been under some of the country\u2019s longest lockdowns, barred from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days.
\nOn Sunday in Shanghai, police kept a heavy presence on Wulumuqi Road, which is named after Urumqi, and where a candlelight vigil the day before turned into protests.
\nBy evening hundreds of people gathered in the area.
\nSome jostled with police trying to disperse them. People held up blank sheets of paper as an expression of protest.
\nOne Reuters witness saw at least seven people taken away by police.
\n\u201cWe just want our basic human rights. We can\u2019t leave our homes without getting a test. It was the accident in Xinjiang that pushed people too far,\u201d said a 26-year-old protester who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the matter.
\n\u201cThe people here aren\u2019t violent, but the police are arresting them for no reason. They tried to grab me but the people all around me grabbed my arms so hard and pulled me back so I could escape.\u201d
\nAnother protestor, Shaun Xiao, said: \u201cI\u2019m here because I love my country, but I don\u2019t love my government…I want to be able to go out freely, but I can\u2019t. Our COVID-19 policy is a game and is not based on science or reality.\u201d
\nOn Saturday, the vigil in Shanghai for victims of the factory fire turned into a protest against COVID curbs, with the crowd chanting calls for lockdowns to be lifted. One large group chanted
\n\u201cDown with the Chinese Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping\u201d, according to witnesses and videos posted on social media, in a rare public protest against the country\u2019s leadership.
\nURUMQI, BEIJING, WUHAN
\nOn Sunday at Beijing\u2019s prestigious Tsinghua University, dozens of people held a peaceful protest against COVID restrictions during which they sang the national anthem, according to images and videos posted on social media.
\nOne student who saw the Tsinghua protest described to Reuters feeling taken aback by the protest at one China\u2019s most elite universities, and Xi\u2019s alma mater.
\n\u201cPeople there were very passionate, the sight of it was impressive,\u201d the student said, declining to be named given the sensitivity of the matter.
\nIn the central city of Wuhan, where the pandemic began three years ago, hundreds of residents took to the streets on Sunday, smashing through metal barricades, overturning COVID testing tents and demanding an end to lockdowns, according to videos on social media that could not be independently verified.
\nThursday\u2019s fire that killed 10 people in a high-rise building in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, saw crowds there take to the street on Friday evening, chanting \u201cEnd the lockdown!\u201d and pumping their fists in the air, according to unverified videos on social media.
\nZERO-COVID
\nChina has stuck with Xi\u2019s zero-COVID policy even as much of the world has lifted most restrictions. While low by global standards, China\u2019s cases have hit record highs for days, with nearly 40,000 new infections on Saturday.
\nChina defends the policy as life-saving and necessary to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system. Officials have vowed to continue with it despite the growing public pushback and its mounting economic toll.
\nChina\u2019s economy suffered a broad slowdown in October as factory output grew more slowly than expected and retail sales fell for the first time in five months, underscoring faltering demand at home and abroad.
\nAdding to a raft of weak data in recent days, China reported on Sunday that industrial firms saw overall profits fall further in the January-October period, with 22 of China\u2019s 41 major industrial sectors showing a decline.
\nThe world\u2019s second-largest economy is also facing other headwinds including a global recession risks and a property downturn.
\nRARE PROTESTS
\nWidespread public protest is extremely rare in China, where room for dissent has been all but eliminated under Xi, forcing citizens mostly to vent on social media, where they play cat-and-mouse with censors.
\nFrustration is boiling just over a month after Xi secured a third term at the helm of China\u2019s Communist Party.
\n\u201cThis will put serious pressure on the party to respond. There is a good chance that one response will be repression, and they will arrest and prosecute some protesters,\u201d said Dan Mattingly, assistant professor of political science at Yale University.
\nStill, he said, the unrest is far from that seen in 1989, when protests culminated in the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square. He added that as long as Xi had China\u2019s elite and the military on his side, he would not face any meaningful risk to his hold on power.
\nThis weekend, Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Ma Xingrui called for the region to step up security maintenance and curb the \u201cillegal violent rejection of COVID-prevention measures\u201d.
\nXinjiang officials have also said public transport services will gradually resume from Monday in Urumqi.
\nOther cities that have seen public dissent include Lanzhou in the northwest, where residents on Saturday upturned COVID staff tents and smashed testing booths, posts on social media showed. Protesters said they were put under lockdown even though no one had tested positive.
\nCandlelight vigils for the Urumqi victims also took place at universities in Nanjing and Beijing.
\nSince Shanghai\u2019s 25 million residents were put under two-month lock-down early this year, Chinese authorities have sought to be more targeted in their COVID curbs, an effort that has been challenged by the surge in infections as the country faces its first winter with the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
\nReporting by Martin Quin Pollard, Yew Lun Tian, Eduardo Baptista and Liz Lee in Beijing and by Brenda Goh, Josh Horwitz, David Stanway, Casey Hall and Engen Tham in Shanghai and the Shanghai Newsroom; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by William Mallard, Kim Coghill, Edwina Gibbs and Raissa Kasolowsky<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SHANGHAI\/BEIJING Hundreds of demonstrators in Shanghai shouted and jostled with police on Sunday evening as protests over China\u2019s stringent COVID restrictions flared for a third day following a deadly factory fire in the country\u2019s far west. The wave of civil disobedience, which has spread to other cities including Beijing, is unprecedented in mainland China since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297870,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-297839","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n