THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
November 28, 2022 at 18:30 JST
BEIJING--When more than 100 people showed up in defiance of Chinese authorities at Liangma bridge in central Beijing on the night of Nov. 27, they were promptly removed by police.
But then the all too predictable story of protest in China being quickly quelled suddenly took an unexpected turn.
Other residents soon appeared on the scene, greeted by cheers from the many others who had amassed surrounding them.
Vehicles traveling nearby honked their horns and played loud music in support of the protestors, who were holding up sheets of white paper to symbolize the lack of freedom of expression in their country.
A man in his 40s said he came out to show support for the demonstrators after he learned about the rally on social media.
“Victims in Urumqi lost their lives in a fire after they were quarantined for nearly three months,” he said. “We have never been isolated for such a long period, but what happened to them is not somebody else’s problem at all. Everybody wants to unleash what has been pent up inside us about the zero-COVID policy.”
Bottled-up resentment against the Chinese government’s strict COVID-19 policy has overflown into public spaces across the country over the past several days, in scenes just like this one, after residents discovered a new avenue to show their anger more common in other countries: protest.
The outpouring of public frustration and civil disobedience, something unprecedented under the rule of the country’s leader Xi Jinping, follows the deaths of 10 people in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China, on Nov. 24.
Many suspect that the victims lost their lives because emergency workers’ rescue efforts were hampered by a lockdown on their apartment building, according to posts on the internet.
The administration had shifted to ease some of its anti-COVID measures after the Communist Party congress in October. But Xi’s administration is drawing even more public anger as its exit strategy from its zero-COVID policy appears to be straying off course.
China’s daily COVID-19 cases topped 30,000 nationwide on Nov. 23--the first time the country has passed that threshold. The daily case counts then set new records for the next four days in a row.
About 90 percent of new cases are reported to be asymptomatic.
But the surge in new cases brought the number of high-risk areas that will be subjected to a COVID-19 lockdown to 26,000 across China. On Nov. 26, new cases exceeded 4,000 in Beijing.
Some residents, feeling they can no longer endure the strict COVID restrictions, have begun to speak up despite knowing that openly defying the authorities will likely make them the target of repression.
In a video apparently shot in Chongqing, a large city in central China, a man took to the streets to compare the government's anti-COVID measures to using a sledgehammer to crack open a nut.
“We have been suffering because the government is mistaken about its COVID policy,” he told a crowd of passers-by.
“You are a hero,” one person said, while others in the crowd hailed his courage with cheers.
Some in Beijing have even won back their freedoms.
Residents of a cluster of apartment buildings saw their lockdown lifted after they criticized local officials for takings steps that contradicted the government’s official policy. Similar protests have spread to lift other neighborhoods from their lockdowns.
The government announced a 20-point plan to ease COVID-19 restrictions on Nov. 11, vowing to limit the extent of the lockdowns as much as possible.
But local officials on the ground appeared to have followed the previous measures instead out of fear the virus may spread.
In the capital's Tongzhou district, residents of an apartment building where a quarantine was lifted chanted, “Human rights! Human rights!”
A video capturing the success story on the internet prompted residents in other neighborhoods to take similar actions.
(This story was written by Nozomu Hayashi in Beijing and Ryo Inoue in Shanghai.)
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A man representing residents of a complex of apartment buildings in a neighborhood in Beijing calls on local officials to lift a lockdown in a video shot on Nov. 26. The video went viral, prompting other residents in the city to follow suit. (Taken from China’s social messaging app WeChat)
