Protests break out across China challenging Xi Jinping's Zero Covid policy: "No to dictatorship, we want democracy"

• Asia Deadly fire in China fuels anger against 'Covid zero' policy

• Asia China begins to rebel against 'Covid zero': violent protests in the world's largest iPhone factory

Sometimes a tragedy is enough to awaken a people from their long lethargy.

When eyes are already wide open and patience shattered by a government that, pulling on patriotism and playing on fear, has done and undone as it pleased for the last three years, a simple act of defiance is enough to focus a critical narrative. that adds more and more followers and that is contagious in all corners.

This is what is happening in China.

The fire in the Xinjiang region ignited the wick of the largest

long time: a fire in a block of flats in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where

, unleashed a fury in line that has already jumped from the network to many corners of the country.

According to the accounts of several witnesses, the restrictions of the Covid zero policy, with sealed buildings and blocked housing estates, prevented the victims from escaping the flames in their houses and the firefighters from arriving in time.

Urumqi is also called the street in Shanghai where in the early hours of Sunday a mob of angry kids surprised people organizing a vigil for the victims of the fire.

, they shouted in unison.

Many young people, with their heads lowered as a sign of the ground, held up white sheets, wanting to show, as they called it, a new symbol of the "people's revolution."

More and more police officers were surrounding the peaceful protest that occupied a narrow street in the prosperous and central area of ​​the French Concession, very close to the Cervantes Institute.

That ignited many protesters, who started chanting directly at the Chinese government.

"No to the dictatorship, we want democracy. We don't need a dictator, we want the right to vote," was one of the slogans during the night.

These phrases have not been openly heard in China since before Xi Jinping came to power, just now 10 years ago.

Almost at dawn, the police ended up dividing the demonstration and arresting some young people.

A few hours later, around 18,000 runners taking part in the annual Shanghai marathon on this date passed through the same protest area.

When asking the public who followed the race behind the tapes, no one knew anything about the vigil for the dead in Urumqi.

To the usual silence of the Chinese media was added the rapid reaction of the censorship apparatus in the homeland's cyberspace to erase any trace of the demonstration that was published online.

Even so, in the groups of WeChat -the Chinese brother of WhatsApp- a video of the protest was leaked with a different angle to avoid deletion.

An example: several young people in a row watching Argentina's victory over Mexico in the World Cup on their mobile while around them there is a lot of movement and chants are heard calling for freedom and the resignation of President Xi Jinping, who in October managed to revalidate a third term as General Secretary of the Communist Party, cementing his status as China's most powerful paramount leader in decades.

Curiously, since the start of the World Cup in Qatar, the anger of the Chinese public against the immutable national zero Covid policy that the president has promoted under the pretext that if China opened its doors to the virus and learned to live with it as they have done in the West, there would be hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths in a country where the population lacks natural immunity and the health infrastructure is very deficient in the vast rural areas.

But after three years under a loop of lockdowns and mass testing, anger has increased as millions of Chinese have turned on television and watched stadiums packed with fans without masks or social distancing at Qatar matches.

China is accumulating confinements at the same time as protests: in the capital, Beijing, in some neighborhoods the residents have broken the blockades and have paraded against the extreme measures.

The same in Chongqing, to the west, and in Guangzhou, to the south.

Even small demonstrations have been organized by residents of cities such as Wuhan and Lanzhou, in the center and north of the country, where mass quarantines have not been decreed as in other corners.

And we must not forget the labor protests, also pushed by the anti-covid restrictions and which ended in clashes with the riot police, which have been exploding all month in an iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, a city that was completely confined this week.

In the last 48 hours, small impromptu protests have also taken place on various university campuses.

The youngest are the ones who are leading the loudest and most numerous complaints to date, such as the one in Shanghai, also headed by university students.

"We could not remain silent after the fire in Urumqi. They say that

. Many have already died from the restriction policy, more than from the virus itself. Older people who died at home during the two-month spring lockdown in Shanghai because no one could take them to the hospital, sick babies who have died locked up in a quarantine center because they weren't allowed out and attendance was late," says one of the students who it was early morning at the Shanghai protest.

The boy explains that they organized and summoned people for the vigil using Signal groups, bypassing mobile censorship with a VPN.

"At the beginning, what we had talked about was making a softer criticism of the zero Covid policy, remembering the victims of the fire, making small gestures such as showing blank pages in disapproval and raising our fists while we sang the Chinese national anthem. and La Internacional", stresses another compañera who also participated in the vigil.

"But then the cries against the president and against the party began. I do not share them, nor do I think that there is a very strong movement in China that opposes Xi Jinping. What there is in this country is a population that is very tired of so many unjustified closures that are ruining many families,

The spark from the Urumqi fire last Thursday night has now shaken a regime with a government that embraces a law that is sacred to them of zero tolerance for any threat of social protest.

Many Xinjiang residents, including those who died in the fire, had been in semi-confinement for more than 100 days and could only leave their housing estates with the permission of their neighborhood committees.

After the tragedy, thousands of residents staged a massive protest in Urumqi

that led the authorities - who denied that the doors of the burning building were closed, hindering the rescue, as some witnesses to the fire claimed - to hold a daily press conference next and to announce that, miraculously, the virus "had been cleaned" from the streets and that restrictions would be eased after a continued confinement of more than three months.

But the spirits did not calm down.

Quite the contrary, after one of the Urumqi officials made a comment that sparked online outrage across the country.

"The residents of the burning building had no knowledge or ability to rescue themselves in time."

Those were his words, as if he wanted to hold the victims of his death responsible for not having managed to escape the fire.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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