Crowds angered by lockdowns call for leadership to step down

Chinese police officers block off access to a site where protesters had gathered in Shanghai, yesterday

Protesters pushed to the brink by China’s strict COVID measures in Shanghai called for the removal of the country’s leadership and clashed with police yesterday as crowds took to the streets in several cities in an astounding challenge to the government, according to a dispatch from AP correspondents in Shanghai.

Police forcibly cleared the demonstrators in China’s financial capital — but hours later people rallied again in the same spot, and social media reports indicated protests also spread to at least seven other cities, including the capital of Beijing, and dozens of university campuses.

Largescale protests are exceedingly rare in China— but a direct rebuke of the ruling Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, “is extraordinary,”observers say.

Three years after the virus first emerged, China is the only major country still trying to stop transmission of COVID-19 — a “zero COVID” policy that regularly sees millions of people confined to their homes for weeks at a time and requires near-constant testing.

The measures were originally widely accepted for minimizing deaths while other countries suffered devastating wavs of infections, but that consensus has begun to fray in recent weeks.

Then on Friday, 10 people died in a fire in an apartment building, and many believe their rescue was delayed because of excessive lockdown measures. That sparked a weekend of protests, as the Chinese public’s ability to tolerate the harsh measures has apparently reached breaking point.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered late Saturday in Shanghai, which experienced a devastating lockdown in the spring in which people struggled to secure groceries and medicines and were forcefully taken into centralized quarantine.

On a street named for the city in China’s far west where the fire happened, one group of protesters brought candles, flowers and signs honoring those who died in the blaze. Another, according to a protester who insisted on anonymity, was more active, shouting slogans and singing the national anthem.

The protester and another, who gave only his last name, Zhao, confirmed the chants. Both insisted on having their identities shielded because they fear arrest or retribution. MDT/AP