- Lift the covid lockdown!
- Xi Jinping, step down!
- There have been protests in dozens of cities,
in major urban centers, from Shanghai to Sichuan,
in college campuses, in business districts.
You've seen people coming out on to the streets
and protesting against the zero COVID policy
that has kept them locked in their homes for many months,
but also against the rule of Xi Jinping
and a whole series of different social and political grievances.
- Give me death or give me liberty!
Give me liberty or give me death!
- The original trigger for the protests
was a fire that killed 10 people in an apartment complex
in the northwestern city of Urumqi.
This is in a very tightly controlled area of the country.
But the real thing that concerned people was that
it seemed like zero COVID and the restrictions on movement
had delayed the emergency response and potentially made it
so that people in their apartments
were unable to leave in time.
And so these 10 deaths kind of created this wave of concern
about what have been months and months
of very harsh lockdowns all across the country.
China has always been very focused on trying
to essentially eliminate the virus within its borders.
More recently, that has become impossible
because of more transmissible variants.
Protests in China are almost always about local issues.
They tend to be relatively small.
They don't last for very long.
Ever since Tiananmen Square,
the Chinese government has developed this playbook
for dealing with what it calls "mass incidents."
And this normally means that initial protests
are dispersed through a mixture of threats
and also trying to appease protestors.
And then afterwards, there will be a huge show of force
and a crackdown which will involve potentially rounding up
some of the ring leaders,
identifying individuals who were there,
and going to their homes,
possibly putting pressure on them.
And so the attempt will be to try
and make it so the protest cannot reoccur,
and we're already starting to see
that playing out over the last few days,
with certain locations and cities like Shanghai
seeing huge numbers of police and big blue barricades to try
and prevent people from coming out on to the streets.
Online, the discussion will be severely limited.
So we've seen terms like "white paper" become censored
because many of the protesters were holding up blank sheets
of A4 paper to protest against censorship.
So there's really a huge apparatus
that kind of comes into play to try and make it
so that as few people as possible are aware
of what has been happening or are able to mobilize.
Xi Jinping is the most powerful leader in China in decades.
So it's very unlikely that this would significantly
undermine his ability to keep control of the party.
But what it does do is create an embarrassing setback
for what has been one of this signature policies
and leave him in this predicament where he has said
that this is the best approach for China.
This moment in time, the policy isn't working.
And at the same time, it's hugely unpopular
and is sparking this broader social discontent.
So he's really backed himself into a corner.
- Chinese people, we have to be braver.
- The fine line that the government has to walk
is to find a way where it can make some tweaks to the policy,
ease out of some of the worst restrictions
without appearing to have reversed course.