SHANGHAI, China —
Chinese security forces detained people and
appeared to prevent a planned protest on Monday as authorities worked to stamp
out widening dissent seeking political freedoms and an end to COVID lockdowns.
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People have
taken to the streets in major cities and gathered at university campuses across
China in a wave of protests not seen since pro-democracy rallies in 1989 were
crushed.
A deadly fire
last week in Urumqi, the capital of northwest China’s Xinjiang region, was the
catalyst for the public anger, with many blaming COVID-19 lockdowns for
hampering rescue efforts.
Beijing accused
“forces with ulterior motives” for linking the fire to COVID measures, saying
on Monday local authorities had “made clear the facts and refuted this
information and smears”.
At an area in
the economic hub of Shanghai where demonstrators gathered at the weekend, AFP
witnessed police leading three people away. China’s censors also worked to
scrub signs of the social media-driven rallies.
A planned
protest in the capital
Beijing later on Monday came to nothing as several dozen
police officers and vans choked a crossroad near the assembly point in western
Haidian district.
Police vehicles
lined the road to nearby Sitong Bridge, where a lone protester hung banners
last month denouncing President Xi Jinping before being detained.
Demonstrators
had planned to march to the bridge following a successful rally the day before
near the Liangma River.
In Hong Kong, where mass democracy protests erupted
in 2019, dozens gathered at the Chinese University to mourn the victims of the
Urumqi fire, an AFP witness said.
People also
displayed banners and held flowers in the financial hub’s Central district.
Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the city after the 2019
protests.
Chants and banners
Protesters have notably used
the rallies to call for greater freedoms. Some have even demanded the
resignation of
President Xi, recently re-appointed to a historic third term as
China’s leader.
Large crowds gathered Sunday in Beijing and
Shanghai, where police clashed with protesters as they tried to stop groups
from converging at Wulumuqi street, named after the Mandarin for Urumqi.
Hundreds of people rallied in the same area with
blank sheets of paper and flowers to hold what appeared to be a silent protest
on Sunday afternoon.
The BBC said one of its journalists had been
arrested and beaten by police while covering the Shanghai protests, although
China’s foreign ministry said the reporter had not identified himself as such.
A British government minister denounced the Chinese
police’s actions as “unacceptable” on Monday.
In Beijing, at least 400 people gathered on the
banks of the Liangma for several hours, some shouting: “We are all Xinjiang
people! Go Chinese people!”
State censors appeared to have largely cleaned
Chinese social media of any news about the rallies by Monday.
The search terms “Liangma River” and “Urumqi Road”
had been scrubbed of any references to the rallies on the Twitter-like Weibo
platform.
‘Boiling point’
China’s strict control of
information and continued travel curbs tied to the zero-
COVID policy make
verifying numbers of protesters across the vast country challenging.
But such widespread rallies are exceptionally rare,
with authorities harshly clamping down on all opposition to the central
government.
Spreading through social media, the protests have
been fuelled by frustration at the central government’s virus policy, under
which authorities impose snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and mass testing
campaigns over just a handful of cases.
Protests also occurred on Sunday in Wuhan, the
central city where COVID-19 first emerged, while there were reports of
demonstrations in Guangzhou and Chengdu.
At the scene of the Beijing riverside rally, where
rows of police vehicles were in place on Monday, a jogger in her twenties told
AFP she had seen the protests on social media.
“This protest was a good thing, it sent the signal
that people were fed up with too strong restrictions,” said the jogger, who
asked not to be identified.
State-run newspaper the People’s Daily published a
commentary Monday morning warning against “paralysis” and “battle-weariness” in
the fight against COVID, but stopped far short of calling for an end to the
hardline policy.
“People have now reached a boiling point because
there has been no clear path to end the zero-COVID policy,” Alfred Wu Muluan, a
Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore, told AFP.
“The party has underestimated the people’s anger.”
China reported 40,052 domestic COVID-19 cases
Monday, a record high but tiny compared to caseloads in the West at the height
of the pandemic.
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