A protest against China’s strict “zero-Covid” policies resurfaced in Shanghai on Sunday afternoon despite police clearing away hundreds of demonstrators with force and pepper spray in the morning.
Crowds stood and filmed as officers shoved people who had gathered in the street and shouted “We don’t want PCR tests, we want freedom!”, according to a witness.
People have been staging protests across China, where street demonstrations are extremely rare, since Friday, but anger and frustration flared over a number of deaths in a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi that the public believe were due to excessive lockdown measures delaying rescue.
A social media crowdsourced list revealed that protests had taken place at 50 colleges. Videos posted online purportedly from Guangzhou in the south, Nanjing in the east, and at least five other cities showed protestors scuffle with police wearing white safety suits or tearing down barricades that had been constructed to section off neighbourhoods. All of the protests could not be reliably verified by The Associated Press.
Shanghai, which endured a disastrous lockdown in the spring during which residents battled to obtain supplies and medications and were forcibly brought into centralised quarantine, provided some of the most popular footage.
Protesters screamed "Xi Jinping!" in the early hours of Sunday while standing on the street named after the Xinjiang city where at least 10 people perished in an apartment fire. Step back! CCP! Step back.
People did shout to have Chinese President Xi Jinping removed, according to a witness in the crowd, which many people would not have expected to hear in one of China's largest cities.
Around midnight on Saturday, hundreds of protesters began to assemble along a roadway in Shanghai.
Middle Urumqi Road separated into two distinct portions. One group kept their composure and collected candles, flowers, and memorial placards for those who perished in the apartment fire. While singing the national anthem and screaming slogans, the other person was more animated.
One demonstrator praised the spirit as positive.
A formal apology was demanded for the deaths caused by the Urumqi fire. Others talked of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where the military was fired upon by the Communist Party in power. One ethnic Uighur person spoke about his encounters with prejudice and police brutality.
The protester, who said it was his first time participating, said: "Everyone thinks that Chinese people are afraid to come out and demonstrate, that they don't have any courage." Actually, I had this thought as well in my heart. However, when I arrived there, I discovered that everyone there was incredibly fearless due to the atmosphere.
The scenario started off calm, but about three in the morning it started to get aggressive.
The demonstrators were first surrounded by police, who dispersed the first, noisier group before moving on to the second, more subdued one. To get people off the main street was the aim.
Zhao, the only name of a protester's family, claimed that two of his acquaintances had been pepper sprayed, while two others had been physically assaulted by police. He claimed that when he attempted to stop police from removing his friend, they stomped on his feet. He was left barefoot after misplacing his shoes during the protest.
In relation to a protest organised by a lone man in Beijing ahead of the 20th Communist Party conference, which was held in the city's capital in October, Zhao claimed that protestors shouted chants like "(We) do not want PCR (tests), we want freedom."
The Xinjiang fire appears to have finally overcome the Chinese public's ability to bear the draconian measures after three years of rigorous lockdowns that kept people locked in their homes for weeks at a time.
When other nations were experiencing devastating outbreaks of infections, China's strategy to managing Covid-19 with rigorous lockdowns and extensive testing was praised by its own populace for minimising deaths.
Mr. Xi had cited the strategy as proof of the Chinese system's superiority to the West, particularly the US, which had politicised the use of masks and had trouble implementing widespread lockdowns.
That mindset has shifted in recent weeks due to a number of catastrophes caused by the strict application of "zero Covid."
According to protesters, hundreds of police in Shanghai lined up and formed clusters around the demonstrators as a means of removing them from the area. Within a few hours, police had dispersed the demonstrators from Urumqi Road in smaller groups by breaking them up.
On Sunday at 5 a.m., the police had cleared the crowd.
One demonstrator claimed he saw numerous people being carried away by police and bundled into vans but was unable to identify them.
Based on pictures and videos from the night as well as information from those who knew the detained, a crowdsourced internet endeavour has so far successfully identified six of the persons being carried away. A young woman solely known by her nickname "Little He" is one of the people being held.
On Sunday evening, posters circulated online asking for additional action in Shanghai and Chengdu, a significant city in southwest China. The rally in Shanghai demanded the return of those detained.
In the meantime, two cities in northwest China, where citizens have been confined to their homes for up to four months, relaxed some anti-virus measures on Sunday as a result of Friday's large-scale protests.
Urumqi, where the fire occurred – a city of 4.8 million people and capital of the Xinjiang region – and the smaller city of Korla were preparing to reopen markets and other businesses in areas deemed at low risk of virus transmission and to restart bus, train and airline services, state media reported.
