How dangerous the latest protests by the Chinese leadership can become cannot be seriously assessed at this stage.
Civil disobedience and local unrest are not unknown in China.
They are a natural consequence of political systems in which the population has no opportunity to feed their concerns through free parliaments or similar bodies.
A few hundred or a few thousand protesters in a country of 1.4 billion people is not a mass gathering.
Dangerous warning signal for the KP
On the other hand, the protests are not only directed against local closures, but in some cases explicitly against the leadership of the CP and party leader Xi Jinping.
This is a dangerous warning signal for an authoritarian system that no longer rules over peasant and working-class people, but over a developing society with a middle class oriented towards upward mobility.
A permanent slump in growth used to be considered the biggest foreseeable legitimation problem for the party.
However, the periodic locking up of the population has no less potential, which is why it can be assumed that Beijing will primarily crack down on people who understand the protest politically.
Xi Jinping wanted to use Corona as an example to show that China's model is superior to the West.
Instead, he provides evidence to the contrary.