Crowds of residents in China’s southern industrial metropolis of Guangzhou broke out of mandatory lockdown and clashed with police as public anger boils over over strict coronavirus control measures in the country Asian.
Dramatic images show some citizens turning over authorities’ vehicles and knocking down the control barriers against the covid. Riot squads have moved to the area.
The riots come after the most severe covid outbreak in Guangzhou since the start of the pandemic.
In the midst of negative economic figures, China’s policy of zero covid is under enormous pressure.
Tensions had been rising in the city’s Haizhu district, which is under stay-at-home orders.
The area is home to many working poor. They complain about not getting paid if they can’t show up for work, as well as food shortages and skyrocketing prices while living under control measures against the virus.
For several nights, they have struggled with covid prevention officers, who are commonly uniformed in white. But on Monday night suddenly anger spilled over onto the streets of Guangzhou in a massive act of defiance.
Unfounded rumors
Once again, the rumors unsubstantiated have played their part in the protests. News has spread in China that test companies are falsifying PCR results to artificially inflate the number and make more money.
In the north of the country, the whirlwind of unverified news is also building pressure.
Officials in Hebei province announced that the city of Shijiazhuang would halt mass testing. However, this generated speculation that the population would be used as guinea pigs to monitor what would happen if the virus was allowed to spread unchecked.
Discussions about it have appeared on social media platforms. social media under the hashtag #ShijiazhuangCovidprevention.
Many panicked locals have stockpiled medicines that are said to help fight covid infection. Supplies in the city seem to have run out for now.
A similar rumor spawned a leak workers at the Foxconn complex in the central city of Zhengzhou two weeks ago, affecting the global supply of Apple-designed iPhone-branded phones.
- The panic in China that led to the mass flight of workers in one of the largest Apple factories in the world
The challenge of local governments
Local governments across China are having trouble trying to comply with the zero covid strategy without destroying their economies. The most recent figures for factory production and retail sales show the devastating impact of the pandemic and the policy with which the government has responded.
And there is not a single province that has reported zero cases in recent days.
Some 549 Millions of people living in the heart of the western megacity of Chongqing are under a kind of lockdown that the people have ironically called “voluntary static management” . This is because, although there has been no official announcement, they have been ordered to stay locked up by community officials.
Jokes have been published on the internet that the Chongqing government did not want to announce a mass lockdown on the same day measures to relax the zero-covid rules across China were unveiled.
As the strategy to fight covid continues to dominate life there, a subtle change may cause concern and panic.
Earlier this week, officials in Beijing’s Chaoyang district decided to shut down many of the test stations on the streets to transfer them within residential complexes.
There was a sudden cut of said PCR test stations. The problem is that many of the office buildings require a daily result, or you can’t get in.
So in the booths that were still open, the lines were huge .
From the workers stranded in Tibet who protested to be able to leave Lhasa, to the lockdown across the Xinjiang region, the zero covid policy is not working out as expected by the government.
A series of changes announced last week that provide a slight easing of the rules were interpreted as a signal that there would possibly be more flexibility. But even if the government is considering it, this won’t necessarily happen quickly.
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