China has been rocked by some of its most significant acts of civil disobedience in years after vigils in Shanghai and other major cities to mark a deadly fire in the Xinjiang region turned into protests over Xi’s draconian zero-Covid policies Jinping.
Social media posts have blamed the death of 10 people in Thursday’s fire at an apartment block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, on Covid-19 restrictions, despite denials by authorities.
On Shanghai’s Wulumuqi Road, named after the city in Xinjiang, hundreds of people attended a vigil on Saturday night. Video footage and photographs of the incident, verified by the FT, showed clashes between police and protesters in the early hours of Sunday.
Earlier, some protesters stood on police cars and others chanted “we don’t want PCR tests”. Some called on the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping to “resign.”
The expression was a direct echo of a rare protest when a sign was posted on a bridge in Beijing last month, which included a list of slogans based on the expression “[we] we don’t want”, including “we don’t want confinement, we want freedom”.
“I know what I’m doing is very dangerous, but it’s my duty,” said one student who rushed to attend the vigil after seeing it online. Another said the event began as a quiet commemoration of the people who died in the Urumqi fire, but then “spinned out of control”.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered again at the site of the vigil, with some carrying white flowers, a symbol of mourning in Chinese culture. Police closed nearby roads, removed flowers from a lamppost and told people to go home.
China has tried to keep the virus at bay through strict lockdowns and quarantine measures for nearly three years, but policy is under immense pressure from rising cases, popular discontent and a slowing economy. On Sunday, authorities reported the most daily infections on record for the fourth consecutive day, with the number approaching 40,000.
Elsewhere on Chinese social media, images of the protests, initially of groups of people in Urumqi since Friday night but later across the country, circulated widely but were also censored.
Videos showed students gathering at a vigil at Nanjing University of Communication, while footage of a similar vigil at a university in Wuhan also emerged elsewhere.
At Peking University in Beijing, images of graffiti on the steps repeating some of the bridge’s slogans in October, such as “we don’t want PCR tests, we want food” circulated.
A student at the university said the graffiti was partially removed by Sunday morning and a food truck was parked in front of it to block his view.
Images showing protesters holding white sheets of paper to symbolize censorship were widely shared on social media.
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A person who attended the vigil in Shanghai confirmed that there were also pieces of white paper. They said a police officer told the crowd he understood how everyone felt but suggested they “keep it in the back of their hearts”.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a China expert and Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the widespread unrest could “become a serious test of the tools of social control developed under Xi.”
Authorities are grappling with outbreaks of Covid in many major cities, including Guangzhou, Chongqing and Beijing. Previous outbreaks in China have been successfully suppressed, but typically occurred in individual cities, such as in Shanghai earlier this year.
In Beijing, where restrictions have been tightened in recent days but authorities have yet to stop short of a full city-wide lockdown, some residents confronted officials at compound-level lockdowns to negotiate their release .
There were signs of people taking advantage of the protests to counter these restrictions elsewhere in China. A Shenzhen resident in his thirties told the FT that the sight of protests in Urumqi and Beijing provided “inspiration” after peaceful negotiations with officials to lift the blockade of his compound failed.
He said he and his neighbors gathered at the gates and shouted “free us” and that the restrictions were later lifted.
“We were copying and pasting what the residents of Beijing and Urumqi did and it worked,” he said.
Additional reporting by Cheng Leng in Hong Kong, Edward White in Seoul and Joe Leahy in Beijing