Tag: Police

Migrant Workers Fuel Protests Over China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Restrictions

Chin@Strategy

The Haizhu District of Guangzhou, where the clashes took place, is a center of garment production, and tens of thousands of migrant workers from rural China make a living in small factories, shops and diners that cram its streets. But there and across much of China, Covid restrictions on work and travel have added to a wider economic slowdown and pushed many small businesses into closure or bankruptcy, leaving migrant workers struggling to make a living. “People don’t have anywhere to vent their frustration,” said a local resident surnamed Hu,…

What China’s Covid Protesters Are Calling For

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As he crossed a small road in Shanghai, the man held up a bundle of flowers and issued a rallying call to a crowd of excited onlookers. Within minutes, he was surrounded by security officials and wrestled into a police car. It was one of the more dramatic moments in several days of protests in China that captured the boldness of young Chinese demonstrators as well as the risks they face in challenging the country’s authoritarian leadership. The protests have been fueled by anger over an apartment building fire in…

Proud, Scared and Conflicted. What the China Protesters Told Me.

Chin@Strategy

They went to their first demonstrations. They chanted their first protest slogans. They had their first encounters with the police. Then they went home, shivering in disbelief at how they had challenged the most powerful authoritarian government in the world and the most iron-fisted leader China has seen in decades. Young Chinese are protesting the country’s harsh “zero-Covid” policy and even urging its top leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. It’s something China hasn’t seen since 1989, when the ruling Communist Party brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrators, mostly…

At a China Covid Protest, a Mix of Giddy Elation and Anxiety

Chin@Strategy

BEIJING — The crowd was hard to make out at first, a dark mass huddled along the Beijing riverbank after sunset. They stood quietly, almost nervously, dozens of people bundled in thick coats beside yellowed willow trees. At their center was a small altar, strewn with candles and flowers, for the 10 people who died in a fire in western China last week. Two hours later, that crowd had swelled into the hundreds, a mass of people marching and chanting for freedom, rule of law, an end to the three…

Chinese diplomat involved in violence at Manchester consulate, MP says

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One of China’s most senior diplomats in the UK was involved in the violence against pro-democracy protesters at the Manchester consulate, a British MP has said. Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP, told the House of Commons that Beijing’s consul general in Manchester, Zheng Xiyuan, was seen “ripping down posters” before a Hong Kong campaigner was attacked on Sunday. Footage posted online shows a person, believed to be Zheng, who is a veteran Chinese Communist party (CCP) official, kicking down a poster and pulling the hair of a protester, who was…

Police in hazmat suits scuffle with people in Shanghai – video

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Police in hazmat suits were filmed grabbing screaming Shanghai residents in a video circulated on Chinese social media on Thursday. Users of the Chinese microblogging site Weibo claimed that local authorities had decided to take over several residential buildings in Zhangjiang county in Pudong district to quarantine Covid patients. Videos show residents kneeling on the ground, begging the police not to take them away, and dozens of officers scuffling with civilians and dragging some of them to the middle of the street The Guardian