Tens of thousands of people protested in the streets against Beijing's strict coronavirus regulations and the suppression of free speech, posing one of Xi Jinping's biggest challenges as president of China.
Over the weekend, sporadic political rallies shook at least ten cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Chengdu. These protests sparked skirmishes with security and law enforcement personnel, which resulted in a wave of arrests, including two foreign journalists.
Outrage after a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, was partially attributed to coronavirus limitations was what first spurred the unexpected upsurge in public disobedience. Although the majority of the demonstrations appeared to have been put an end by Monday, they came after months of anger, particularly among China's youth, due to the country's constant lockdowns, quarantines, and mass testing.
The Hang Seng China Enterprises index in Hong Kong fell as much as 4.5 percent in early trade on Monday, as the yuan weakened against the dollar.
Online images showed thousands of people walking along a street in a busy retail center in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the first coronavirus cases first surfaced, in what appeared to have been the largest single protest at the weekend.
One participant told the Financial Times that the crowd, which was in the tens of thousands, "liberated" neighborhoods that had been placed under lockdown by tearing down the fencing surrounding residential compounds. Numerous additional locations throughout the city saw the start of demonstrations.
According to a provincial education official on Monday, the administration has asked institutions all throughout the nation to send students home as quickly as possible to stop additional unrest on campuses.
Hundreds of students in Beijing's capital held nonviolent protests on Sunday at the esteemed Tsinghua and Peking universities. Students in Beijing and protesters in other cities held blank sheets of paper as a sign of opposition to the tightening censorship under Xi's rule.
We don't want PCR tests, we want freedom, the demonstrators chanted as they gathered at a major canal in the capital on Sunday. By Monday morning, there were twelve police cars and vans parked at canal entrances.
Groups of officers paced up and down the trails that run beside the river as a bus full of more police officers waited nearby. Most protest-related signs had been removed.
Analysts said the scope and stern political demands of the series of vigils held in response to the murders in Urumqi were unprecedented for China in recent memory. If unrest erupted once more, they threatened, protestors would suffer harsh retaliation.
As the Chinese Communist party's head for an unprecedented third term, Xi is now the country's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. His administration has been characterized by the rapid suppression of any signs of dissent and the growth of the state's draconian security and surveillance infrastructure.
According to John Delury, a China researcher at Yonsei University in Seoul, "you'd expect them to have a heavy-handed repressive attitude, but that risks creating martyrs, fueling another wave, and giving a rallying call to the demonstrators that have already come out."
They are intelligent enough to understand the risks, but they also can't stand by and allow it to happen.
Beijing feared a "nationwide" movement, according to Yuen Yuen Ang of the University of Michigan. Beijing has historically faced intermittent rallies in China.
"The protests... were not focused on particular local problems. Instead, she said, people were protesting against zero-Covid, which was both a national policy and Xi's personal agenda and which he had only recently declared that China must "stick to without wavering."
