Why are Anti-Government protests taking place in China's major cities?

People from large cities, including Shanghai and Beijing, are voicing out against the government's "Zero Covid" plan, which mandates stringent lockdowns even in the event of a single coronavirus incidence. Although the plan has been in place for some time, this is the reason why the protests are escalating right now.

Xinjiang's Catalyst

The public's long-standing discontent with the policy, which has come to the fore because of a recent occurrence, is thought to be the root of the protests currently taking place. Ten people were murdered in a high-rise building fire on Thursday (November 24) in Urumqi, the capital of the unrest-ridden Xinjiang region of northwest China. According to the AP, groups of people came to the streets on Friday night, yelling "End the lockdown!" and pounding their fists. Some people in Urumqi have been imprisoned for up to 100 days.

A greater number of deaths and more challenging evacuation were allegedly caused by the forced lockdown, which fueled the crowd's rage. Chinese officials have refuted this, and over the weekend, Ma Xingrui, the secretary of the Xinjiang Communist Party, urged the area to increase security and stop the "illegal violent rejection of COVID-prevention measures."

It's interesting to note that a sizable Uyghur population—a Chinese ethnic minority—also calls Xinjiang home. Over the years, numerous international organisations and governments in the West have claimed that the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs amounts to grave human rights breaches. So protests in Xinjiang are particularly dangerous.

The Breakout

Crowds were seen yelling "Serve the people," "We want freedom," and "We don't want health codes" in videos from Shanghai, alluding to the mobile phone apps that must be scanned for access into public spaces around China. On Saturday night, locals gathered on Wulumuqi Road, which bears Urumqi's name, for a candlelight vigil that turned into a protest on Sunday.

The demonstrators held up blank pieces of paper as a sign of opposition to censorship. A video that was shared on social media supposedly shows them yelling, "lift lockdown for Urumqi, lift lockdown for Xinjiang, lift lockdown for all of China!" afterwards. Another time, a huge crowd started yelling, “Down with the Chinese Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping”, according to videos surfacing online.

Other cities that have experienced protests include Lanzhou in the northwest, where locals broke testing booths and turned over Covid staff tents on Saturday. Although none had tested positive, protesters claimed that they were still placed under lockdown.

A witness said that the Shanghai police pepper sprayed roughly 300 demonstrators. At least five other cities, including Nanjing in the east and Guangzhou in the south, showed demonstrators squabbling with police.

So why has China maintained its "Zero Covid" policy?

China argues that the policy is important to save lives and prevent the healthcare system from being overburdened, and to some extent, it has been successful. China has had fewer fatalities and less widespread disease than other large nations.

On the other hand, public annoyance has also grown. Furthermore, Shanghai, one of the busiest ports in the world, as well as other industrial hubs have occasionally been shut down by anti-virus regulations. These shutdowns have kept millions of families inside their homes, which has reduced consumer spending and hurt the economy.

According to Yale University's Dan Mattingly, an assistant professor of political science, "This will put tremendous pressure on the party to respond. There is a significant possibility that one response will be repression, and some protestors will likely be detained and charged. He claimed that despite this, the turmoil today is nothing like that of 1989, when demonstrations in Tiananmen Square resulted in a violent crackdown.