Protests outside China increase pressure on Xi’s Covid-zero policy

Protests against China’s Covid-zero policy have spread to at least a dozen cities around the world. This is a show of solidarity with demonstrators in the Asian country who, over the weekend, staged the biggest wave of challenges to the communist regime since leader Xi Jinping came to power.

According to a survey by the Reuters news agency, vigils and protests, albeit on a small scale, were held in cities in Asia, Europe and North America, such as London, Paris, Tokyo and Sydney. The acts have been organized, for the most part, by dissidents and expatriate students.

“When I saw so many Chinese citizens and students taking to the streets, my feeling was that they endured much more than we did. Now we are showing support for them from abroad,” said Chiang Seeta, a graduate student who organized a rally in Paris this Sunday (27), with more than 200 people.

In Tokyo, around 90 protesters gathered at Shinjuku, one of the busiest train stations in the Japanese capital. According to Reuters, those present concentrated the focus of the protests against Covid zero on the Chinese Communist Party.

The guidelines for the acts, however, should be less belligerent in other cities. One of the organizers of a protest scheduled for this Monday (28) at Columbia University, in New York, said that even more sensitive issues for Beijing, such as Taiwan’s independence and allegations of human rights violations against Uighurs in Xinjiang , should stay out of the demonstrations.

Asked at a news conference on Monday, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Beijing was not aware of any protests abroad calling for an end to the Covid-zero policy.

Regarding the demonstrations at the domestic level, the diplomacy representative declined to speak and said that the question “does not reflect what really happened” and that China believes that the fight against the coronavirus will be successful with the leadership of the Communist Party and with the population cooperation.

China recorded on Monday the fifth consecutive daily record of new cases of Covid. There were 40,052, up from 39,506 on Sunday. Megacities Guangzhou and Chongqing, with thousands of cases, are struggling to contain outbreaks, while hundreds of infections have been reported in other cities across the country.