Residents of the multi-million Chinese city of Shanghai, located in the east of the country, demonstrated on Sunday against the tough anti-COVID restrictions being implemented today in China.
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One Shanghai resident, who asked to remain anonymous, told that on Sunday, people protested in the city against the Chinese authorities’ strict anti-COVID policy. The source of the agency shared a video from the scene, which shows how a crowd gathered at one of the intersections of the city, as well as a large number of police officers.
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In the past few days, videos have been circulating on social media, allegedly filmed in various cities in China, in which people chant slogans against severe anti-COVID restrictions and lockdowns. Once posted, these videos are quickly removed from Chinese social media.
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One of the drivers of the growth of protest moods in China was a fire on November 24 in a residential building in Urumqi, located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the northwest of China, which killed 10 people.
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According to one popular opinion among Chinese Internet users, the victims could have been avoided if not for the anti-COVID restrictions imposed on the residential complex in which the fire broke out. Xinhua News Agency on Saturday reported that authorities in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region were conducting a thorough investigation into the deadly fire and vowed to bring those suspected of dereliction of duty to justice.
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On Sunday afternoon, students from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, protested against the tough anti-COVID restrictions.
For the fourth day in a row, China records a daily anti-record in the number of detected cases of COVID-19 over the entire period of the pandemic, over the past day 39,791 cases were registered in the country. In total, during the pandemic, according to authorities, 307,802 cases of infection with symptoms of COVID-19 were registered in mainland China, 5,233 people died. Asymptomatic cases of infection in China are considered separately, there are no statistics on them for the entire period of the pandemic.
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In recent months, China has again seen a deterioration in the epidemiological situation due to numerous local outbreaks of COVID-19, due to which partial lockdowns have been introduced in a number of cities, and people are forced to undergo PCR testing daily. So, from November 24, restrictive measures were tightened against the backdrop of an increase in the incidence of COVID-19 in a number of major cities in China, including Beijing and Shanghai.
