Anger over the excesses of China’s zero-COVID-19 policy erupted in rare protests across the country this weekend, with thousands of ordinary citizens taking to the streets to call for freedom and even directly challenge the ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping.
Huge crowds filled the streets in Urumqi in China’s far western region of Xinjiang on Friday, a day after 10 people there died, trapped in a burning building that was partially locked down. The incident – coming on the heels of a string of other fatalities linked to forced quarantines – sparked outrage and grief that erupted into broader protests Saturday and Sunday in Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, Beijing, and many other cities.
“We don’t want [COVID] tests, we want freedom!” demonstrators chanted as they marched in central Beijing last night.
In China, large-scale protests have erupted across the country in response to draconian COVID-19 restrictions. As the protests spread, so does the cause – demonstrators are now calling for all kinds of freedoms in a rare show of national unity.
“Everyone is angry about the anti-epidemic policy and can’t tolerate it anymore,” said Jia Yin, who joined a video call Monday with protestors in other cities to compare experiences and share advice. Withholding her real name for her protection, Ms. Jia recounted being surrounded by police during the peaceful protest in the southern city of Guangzhou on Sunday.
While China’s increasingly draconian lockdowns have generated sporadic resistance by citizens in recent months, the latest demonstrations mark an unprecedented show of national solidarity and defiance – not only against the COVID-19 constraints but against the tightening of political controls under Mr. Xi since he took power in 2012.
“We were shouting slogans until 1 or 2 in the morning,” said Xiao Qian, a factory worker who protested with thousands of others in Shanghai Saturday night.
“We chanted ‘liberate China,’ ‘Communist Party – step down,’ ‘Xi Jinping – step down,’” she said, using a screen name for her protection. “We knew we were making history.”
In mass protests across China, goals go beyond easing COVID rules
The theme of liberty ran through the protests, with some demonstrators calling for freedom of speech and the press, rule of law, and democracy, while also singing China’s national anthem and its opening line: “Stand up! Those who are unwilling to become slaves!”
Even with police tightening security at Shanghai and Beijing rally sites, and censors working overtime to scrub protest news and curb organizing efforts on social media, it’s clear that China’s management of COVID-19 has sparked the country’s largest wave of civil disobedience in decades.
“It’s very, very rare that you can see a political protest ... nationwide,” says Xiao Qiang, a human rights activist and research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “These are the most significant since Tiananmen,” he adds, referring to the massive 1989 pro-democracy movement centered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Delivery workers ride along largely deserted streets in the central business district of Beijing, on Nov. 28, 2022. Authorities eased rules in scattered areas, but affirmed China's commitment to Xi Jinping's zero-COVID-19 strategy Monday after crowds of protesters demanded he resign.
After the COVID-19 outbreak struck the gritty Yangtze River city of Wuhan in late 2019, its population of 11 million people endured the bulk of China’s deaths and its first major state-imposed lockdown – a move that stunned the world and helped the country limit the spread of the epidemic.
China’s zero-COVID-19 policy, directed by Mr. Xi, proved effective initially and has succeeded in continuing to keep deaths and cases low by international standards. But this year, suppressing outbreaks of new, rapidly spreading variants have required evermore sweeping controls, seeing millions quarantined in hospitals and makeshift shelters or confined for months in apartment buildings, slowing economic growth, and creating a surge in joblessness.
The mounting frustration saw hundreds of people rush down Wuhan’s main Hanzheng Road on Sunday, breaking down barricades and clashing with police until late into the night.
Urging the protesters on, one netizen wrote that “in 2020, the national fight against the epidemic depends on Wuhan, and in 2022 the unblocking of the nation depends on Wuhan.”
“Two years ago [Wuhan] could be locked down because the people believed in the country and the government,” another person wrote in an outpouring of online comments. “But now it can’t be sealed because credibility and the people’s hearts have been destroyed.”
By doubling down on his zero-COVID policy despite the rising costs, Mr. Xi has sought to prevent an overwhelmed medical system and much higher casualties among China’s large elderly population. But with the vast majority of cases currently labeled asymptomatic, many people view the government’s measures as excessive and overly constraining.
The upshot, experts say, is that Mr. Xi’s policy has accomplished something politically that he and the party have worked hardest to prevent – discontent and protests that have unified Chinese across the country from all walks of life.
“The policy restrictions affect every single one of Chinese citizens, whether restaurant owner or migrant worker or peasant or business executive – they all suffered living under this,” says Mr. Xiao, founder and editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website.
As crowds took to the streets in different cities, they shouted solidarity with one another – Shanghai residents chose to rally on Urumqi street and called for liberating Xinjiang from its months-long lockdown. Then after police detained some protesters in Shanghai, Beijing marchers responded with chants calling for their release.
“China’s zero-COVID policy is pursued in such an extreme way that this violation of civil liberties became unavoidable, and it’s precisely those violations and the second-order crises that touched a raw nerve,” says Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.
An epidemic-prevention worker in a protective suit stands guard at the gate of a residential compound as Beijing struggles to contain one of its worst COVID-19 outbreaks since 2020, on Nov. 28, 2022. China’s zero-COVID-19 policy proved effective initially, but many experts wonder if the no-tolerance approach is sustainable.
“Democracy and the rule of law! Freedom of expression!” students at Beijing’s elite Qinghua University chanted on Sunday, as acts of protest broke out at dozens of higher learning institutions across China.
Such open political defiance by college students is extraordinary in China given how tightly controlled their classrooms are – including surveillance cameras at lectures – and have been ever since students led the 1989 Tiananmen movement, experts say.
“Usually, university students are always listening to the party, but now they are saying, ‘Down with CCP [the Chinese Communist Party], down with Xi Jinping,’” says Alfred Wu, associate professor in the Lee Kuan Yew school of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
Indeed, protesters in Beijing and elsewhere showed unusual courage to speak out and face the danger of being arrested – as witnesses said some protesters were.
“We know every person takes a risk to go onto the street,” said Dong Tian, who joined protests later Sunday night along an urban waterway in northeast Beijing. A heavy presence of uniformed and plainclothes police restricted the crowd, she said, using a screen name to avoid retribution.
Many protesters in Beijing and elsewhere held up blank sheets of white paper – a means of expressing opposition without using words. That tactic was adopted by people in Hong Kong after Beijing’s imposition in June 2020 of a national security law that effectively restricted freedom of speech and other basic rights in the territory, following mass pro-democracy protests there in 2019.
The unrest poses a dilemma for China’s leadership, which continues to urge the country to persevere with Mr. Xi’s COVID-19 policy. A commentary on Monday in People’s Daily, the Party’s main mouthpiece, called for its “resolute implementation by all localities.”
“Xi and senior party officials have staked their credibility and legitimacy on this zero-COVID policy,” says Jennifer Hsu, an expert in Chinese civil society at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “I don’t see any sort of loosening of those restrictions over the winter for sure,” as cases are already surging to record levels, she says.
The more likely scenario, she says, is that China will use its powerful security apparatus to suppress any continued protests, which some supporters have dubbed the “White Paper Revolution” or “A4 Revolution” for demonstrators’ use of symbolic blank pages.
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