Hundreds of demonstrators and police clashed in Shanghai on Sunday night as protests over China's stringent COVID-19 restrictions flared for a third day, spreading to several cities in the wake of a deadly apartment fire in the country's far west.
The wave of civil disobedience is unprecedented in mainland China since President Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago, as frustration mounts over his signature zero-COVID policy nearly three years into the pandemic. The COVID-19 measures are also exacting a heavy toll on the world's second-largest economy.
A fire on Thursday at a residential highrise building in the city of Urumqi, which is the capital of the Xinjiang region, triggered protests after videos of the incident posted on social media led to accusations that lockdowns were a factor in the deaths of 10 people, after emergency workers took three hours to extinguish the blaze.
Urumqi officials abruptly held a news conference on Saturday to deny that pandemic measures had hampered escape and rescue efforts. Many of the city's four million residents have been under some of China's longest lockdowns, barred from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days.
Protesters also took to the streets in several other cities on Sunday, including Beijing, where small gatherings held peaceful vigils, while students on numerous university campuses around China gathered to demonstrate over the weekend.
'Down with Xi Jinping'
On Sunday in Shanghai, police kept a heavy presence on Wulumuqi Road, which is named after Urumqi, and where a candlelight vigil the day before turned into protests.
By Sunday evening, hundreds of people gathered in the area. Some jostled with police trying to disperse them. People held up blank sheets of paper as an expression of protest.
At another point, a large group began shouting, "Down with the Chinese Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping," according to witnesses and videos, in a rare public protest against the country's leadership.
A Reuters witness saw police escorting people onto a bus that was later driven away through the crowd with a few dozen people on board. One protester told Reuters that the crowd was not violent, "but the police are arresting them for no reason."
At the campus of Beijing's Tsinghua University, a large crowd gathered, according to images and videos posted on social media. Some people also held blank sheets of paper.
A large crowd also gathered in the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu, according to videos on social media, where they also held up blank sheets of paper and chanted: "We don't want lifelong rulers. We don't want emperors," a reference to Xi, who has scrapped presidential term limits.
In the central city of Wuhan, where the pandemic began three years ago, videos on social media showed hundreds of residents take to the streets, smashing through metal barricades, overturning COVID-19 testing tents and demanding an end to lockdowns.
Other cities that have seen public dissent include Lanzhou in the northwest, where residents on Saturday overturned COVID-19 staff tents and smashed testing booths, posts on social media showed. Protesters said they were put under lockdown even though no one had tested positive.
China has stuck with Xi's signature zero-COVID policy even while much of the world tries to co-exist with the coronavirus. While low by global standards, China's cases have hit record highs for days, with nearly 40,000 new infections on Saturday.
Protest extremely rare
China defends the policy as life-saving and necessary to prevent overwhelming the health-care system. Officials have vowed to continue with it despite the growing public pushback and its mounting toll on the world's second-biggest economy.
Widespread public protest is extremely rare in China, where room for dissent has been all but eliminated under Xi, forcing citizens mostly to vent on social media, where they play cat-and-mouse with censors.
Frustration is boiling just over a month after Xi secured a third term at the helm of China's Communist Party.
"This will put serious pressure on the party to respond. There is a good chance that one response will be repression, and they will arrest and prosecute some protesters," said Dan Mattingly, assistant professor of political science at Yale University.
Still, he said, the unrest is far from that seen in 1989, when protests culminated in the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square. He added that as long as Xi had China's elite and the army on his side, he would not face any meaningful risk to his hold on power.
This weekend, Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary Ma Xingrui called for the region to step up security maintenance and curb the "illegal violent rejection of COVID-prevention measures."
Xinjiang officials have also said public transport services will gradually resume starting Monday in Urumqi.
