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China’s anti-lockdown protests spread to dozens of campuses

Protests in China against the government’s harsh COVID-19 lockdown measures continued to intensify over the weekend, spreading to dozens of university campuses around the country in an unprecedented challenge to the Communist Party on a scale unseen in decades.

The protests against lockdowns were triggered by widespread anger at the death of at least 10 people in a fire in an apartment in the western city of Urumqi, with delays in extinguishing the blaze widely seen by the public as a result of lockdown policies.

The protests have coincided with a record outbreak of cases across China in recent days, which have brought fresh lockdowns. The National Health Commission on Sunday reported more than 39,500 cases, the highest since the pandemic began.

Late on Saturday night, crowds gathered in Shanghai, China’s largest city and financial capital, on Urumqi Road — named after the city in Xinjiang — to mourn the victims of the fire. Videos on social media showed protesters calling for an end to lockdowns and mass testing. Some raised slogans against Xi and the ruling Communist Party. Several hundred people gathered in Beijing on Sunday night for a rare protest. Some laid out candles to mourn those in Urumqi, while others chanted, “We don’t want COVID tests, we want freedom!” A large police presence was deployed around the protest that took place near the Liangma river in the heart of the capital.

Protests this weekend spread to more than 50 Chinese college campuses, according to a list shared online and dozens of protest videos shared on social media. In the elite Tsinghua University in the heart of the Chinese capital — Xi’s alma mater — students gathered on Sunday, chanting: “We need democracy, rule of law, and freedom of expression!”

“We haven’t seen scenes like this since 1989,” a veteran Chinese journalist told The Hindu, referring to the Tiananmen Square protests.

This weekend, thousands of students gathered across the country, from Sichuan University in the West to Nanjing Communications University in the east. While in China local-level protests against issues ranging from land grabs to environmental pollution are not uncommon, what is now unprecedented is a national-level protest on the same issue, and carried out in direct opposition to a central government policy. Only last month, Xi defended the zero-COVID policy at the Party Congress that marked the start of his third term.

Meanwhile, in a related development, the BBC said on Sunday one of its journalists in China had been arrested and beaten by police while covering protests against the country’s zero-Covid policy. Hundreds of people took to the streets in China’s major cities on Sunday in a rare outpouring of public anger against the state.

“The BBC is extremely concerned about the treatment of our journalist Ed Lawrence, who was arrested and handcuffed while covering the protests in Shanghai,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

Lawrence, working in the country as an accredited journalist, was detained for several hours, during which time he was beaten and kicked by police, according to the BBC. He was later released.

“It is very worrying that one of our journalists was attacked in this way whilst carrying out his duties,” the statement said. “We have had no official explanation or apology from the Chinese authorities, beyond a claim by the officials who later released him that they had arrested him for his own good in case he caught Covid from the crowd,” the statement added. “We do not consider this a credible explanation.”