COVID PROTESTS SWEEP CHINA

Xi faces wave of angry pushback

SHANGHAI • Barely a month after granting himself new powers as China's potential leader for life, Xi Jinping is facing a wave of public anger of the kind not seen for decades, sparked by his “zero COVID” strategy that will soon enter its fourth year.

Demonstrators poured into the streets over the weekend in cities including Shanghai and Beijing, criticizing the policy, confronting police — and even calling for Xi to step down. On Monday, demonstrators gathered in the semi-autonomous southern city of Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy movement was all but snuffed out by a crackdown following months-long demonstrations that began in 2019.

Students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong chanted “oppose dictatorship” and “Freedom! Freedom!” Floral tributes were laid in the Central district that had been the epicentre of previous protests.

The widespread demonstrations are unprecedented since the army crushed the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement centred on Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Most protesters focused their anger on restrictions that can confine families to their homes for months and have been criticized as neither scientific nor effective.

The cries for the resignation of Xi and the end of the Communist Party that has ruled China for 73 years could be deemed sedition, which is punishable by prison.

In response, police in Shanghai used pepper spray to drive away demonstrators, and dozens were detained in police sweeps. China's vast internal security apparatus is also famed for identifying people it considers troublemakers and picking them up later when few are watching.

The possibility of more protests is unclear. Government censors scrubbed the internet of videos and messages supporting them. And analysts say unless divisions emerge, the Communist Party should be able to contain the dissent.

Without mentioning the protests or the criticism of Xi, some local authorities eased restrictions Monday. The city government of Beijing announced it would no longer set up gates to block access to apartment compounds where infections are found.

Guangzhou, a manufacturing and trade centre that is the hot spot in the latest wave of infections, announced some residents will no longer be required to undergo mass testing.

China's stringent measures were originally accepted for minimizing deaths while other countries suffered devastating waves of infections, but that consensus has begun to fray in recent weeks.

While the ruling party says anti-coronavirus measures should be “targeted and precise” and cause the least possible disruption to people's lives, local officials are threatened with losing their jobs or other punishments if outbreaks occur.

They have responded by imposing quarantines and other restrictions that protesters say exceed what the central government allows.

Xi's unelected government doesn't seem too concerned with the hardships. This spring, millions of Shanghai residents were placed under a strict lockdown that resulted in food shortages and restricted access to medical care. Nevertheless, in October, the city's party secretary, a Xi loyalist, was appointed to the Communist Party's No. 2 position.

The party has long imposed surveillance and travel restrictions on minorities including Tibetans and Muslim groups such as Uyghurs.

But this weekend's protests included many members of the educated urban middle class from the ethnic Han majority. The ruling party relies on that group to abide by an unwritten post-tiananmen agreement to accept autocratic rule in exchange for a better quality of life.

Now, it appears that old arrangement has ended as the party enforces control at the expense of the economy, said Hung Ho-fung of Johns Hopkins University.

“The party and the people are trying to seek a new equilibrium,” he said. “There will be some instability in the process.”

To develop into something on the scale of the 1989 protests would require clear divisions within the leadership, Hung said.

Xi all but eliminated such threats at an October party congress. He broke with tradition and awarded himself a third five-year term as party leader and packed the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee with loyalists.

“Without the clear signal of party leader divisions ... I would expect this kind of protest might not last very long,” Hung said.

It's “unimaginable” that Xi would back down, and the party is experienced in handling protests, Hung said.

China is now the only major country still trying to stop transmission of the virus. The head of the World Health Organization has called “zero COVID” unsustainable. Beijing dismissed his remarks as irresponsible.

Protests erupted after a fire on Thursday killed at least 10 people in an apartment building in the city of Urumqi, where some residents have been locked in their homes for four months. That prompted an outpouring of angry questions online about whether firefighters or people trying to escape were blocked by locked doors or other pandemic restrictions.

“Zero COVID” was “supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the `Chinese model,' but ended up demonstrating the risk that when authoritarian regimes make mistakes, those mistakes can be colossal,” said Andrew Nathan, a Chinese politics specialist at Columbia University. “But I think the regime has backed itself into a corner and has no way to yield. It has lots of force, and if necessary, it will use it,” Nathan said.