China tightens security measures admist unprecedented protests
Since Chairman Xi Jinping took office a decade ago, protesters have made an unparalleled display of civil disobedience on the streets of numerous Chinese cities and on dozens of university campuses. Dissent has been suppressed under Xi’s leadership, and a sophisticated system of social surveillance has been expanded, making protests more difficult and dangerous.
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Police patrolled the locations of the weekend demonstrations in Shanghai and Beijing on Monday after crowds there and in other Chinese cities protested against the strict COVID-19 regulations that have disrupted life for three years already.
Since Chairman Xi Jinping took office a decade ago, protesters have made an unparalleled display of civil disobedience on the streets of numerous Chinese cities and on dozens of university campuses. Dissent has been suppressed under Xi’s leadership, and a sophisticated system of social surveillance has been expanded, making protests more difficult and dangerous.
In Beijing and Shanghai, there were no indications of fresh protests on Monday, although dozens of police officers were stationed in the locations of the weekend demonstrations.
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A setback for China’s efforts to eradicate the virus, which is infecting record numbers three years after first appearing in the central city of Wuhan, is the pushback against COVID regulations.
The zero-COVID policy has helped to keep the official death toll in China below a million, compared to over a million in the United States, but at the expense of keeping large numbers of people confined to their homes for extended periods of time, severely disrupting and harming the world’s second-largest economy.
Reversing it would mean Xi’s policy would be undone. In a nation with hundreds of millions of elderly people and low levels of COVID immunity, it would also run the risk of overwhelming the healthcare system and causing widespread disease and deaths, according to experts.
The protests were not covered by state media, which instead urged people to abide with COVID regulations in editorials. According to many commentators, China won’t likely reopen until March or April and will need a successful vaccine programme before then.
The demonstrations do not imminently threaten the existing political order, but they do mean the current COVID policy mix is no longer politically sustainable,” analysts at Gavekal Dragonomics wrote in a note.
“The question now is what re-opening will look like. The answer is: slow, incremental and messy.”
