Protests Against Covid-19 Restrictions

According to Dyer (2022), protests are widespread across the People’s Republic of China (P.R. China) following the complete lockdowns instilled by the Chinese government. The government has instilled a Zero Covid Policy, which features stringent pandemic restrictions. Additionally, the protests are fueled by infectious Covid-19 variants such as omicron. Students have been sent home from campuses, and businesses shut down following the proliferating demonstrations and renewed cases of unrest, especially in Guangzhou, a southern city in P.R. China. Towards the end of November, the police chased and arrested demonstrators in seven Chinese cities. In most cities, there were continued arrests with social media posts depicting protestor vs. police faceoffs in streets within Guangzhou cities. In some instances, Dyer mentions that the police checked pedestrians’ mobile gadgets to verify if they utilized Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) like telegrams and others banned in P.R. China. This paper reviews the continued protests against Covid-19 restrictions in China. It starts by providing an overview of the problem causing the social unrest and proceeds to evaluate the tactics utilized to contain the protests. Likewise, it mentions the outcome and consequences of the tactic utilized while appraising the legitimacy of the tactic.

China’s Zero-Covid Policy was a government goal targeted at containing Covid-19 cases and ensuring they remained close to zero. Tactics to enhance the Zero-covid Policy comprised isolating the sick, mass testing, and ensuring stern lockdowns around the country to ensure that infected individuals did not spread the highly infectious Covid-19 flu (VOA News, 2022). The Policy began in Wuhan, where the virus initially broke out towards the end of 2019. In Wuhan alone, the 11 million population was locked in their households, whereas the rest of China adopted the Zero Covid policy later. In the VOA report, the Chinese government insists that the plan has helped avert the severe impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. The infection and morbidity rates in P.R. China remain relatively lower than in western countries.

The public response, however, fails to depict the insinuations made by the Chinese government. Initially, the public of the P.R. of China depicted profuse discontent with the government’s move to reduce movement after imposing the lockdown. Conversely, the results did not correspond with the government’s efforts to combat the spread of the virus. Individuals in Guangzhou, for instance, protested in major cities following the severity of the lockdown and the dire outcomes of movement cessation. Although the methods utilized in the Zero-Covid Policy included lockdowns, contract tracing applications, and quarantine, most of the Policy was implemented at the local level. Some negative effects reported in the VOA news article comprise food shortage, economic downturn, and negative effects generally on travel and life. Likewise, there was an interruption in life-saving services such as rescue. For instance, in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, ten residents lost their lives in an apartment, leading to delayed delivery of paramedic and fire-fighting services due to the lockdown.

Eventually, there was a massive uproar from citizens and worldwide bodies criticizing the zero-Covid Policy. The planned restrictions were not working when China experienced its third Covid-19 wave. The cases reached 30,437 by the end of 30th November 2020. Experts, including Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Word Health Organization’s director general, asserted that the Zero-Covid Policy was unsustainable. According to the director, the Policy was unlike other successful interventions, such as importing mRNA vaccines. Alternatively, the Chinese government went for locally produced, less effective shots that contributed dismally to alleviating the rapidly increasing infection figures. Consequently, the looser approach was highly criticized. Masses gathered daily on the streets to demand more informed policies. Some citizens even wrote on social media that then-president Xi should resign his position since he did not withstand the test of practice.

We can determine that the Chinese Communist Party has long utilized coercion and inducement in the Xinjiang region to control its population (Leibold, 2019). During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government, through President Xi, utilized physical surveillance through technology-driven tools, some of which Su et al. (2021) mention in their report. Similarly, the coercion technique comes in handy to forecast citizen behavior and coerce them into desisting from protests and following government directives. However, the utility of the approach led to the erosion of social trust in Xinjiang’s society, as noted in the article, and the marginalization of minority societies, such as Uyghur Muslims