China controls protests, starts investigations against protesters

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China’s crackdown on the country’s biggest wave of civil disobedience under Xi Jinping appears to be having an effect and dampening the momentum of the demonstrations. Authorities have begun opening inquiries into citizen participation in protests, and there are large numbers of police on the streets of Chinese megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Two protesters who took part in demonstrations in the capital against the zero Covid policy at the weekend told the Reuters news agency that they were summoned to appear at police stations to give testimony about their activities in the demonstrations.

It is still unclear how the authorities identified these demonstrators and the possible legal dimension of these inquiries. Beijing’s Public Security Bureau did not respond to Reuters queries. This Tuesday (29), a spokesman for Chinese diplomacy said that the exercise of rights and freedoms is conditioned to the structure of the law.

Large universities in China, which have concentrated some of the main protests since the weekend, suspended face-to-face classes and sent their students home. According to the Associated Press, Tsinghua University, as well as other institutions in Beijing and Guandong province, claimed that the measure was due to a strategy to contain the rise in cases of Covid-19.

It is a fact that the curve of new infections has risen significantly in recent days, but the decision to send students home is also seen as an attempt to demobilize activism in universities, historically a kind of incubator for protests.

As shown to Sheet, Tsinghua University was the scene of a demonstration on Sunday (27). It started with a silent act by a student who held up a blank sign and, as other classmates joined the protester, it brought together about 400 people. On the same day, the deputy secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the university went to the scene to end the protest, which lasted just over two hours.

This Tuesday, institution officials met with students again to discuss Covid-related restrictions. Students told the South China Morning Post newspaper that sanitary measures were the only topic of the meeting, with no mention of the protests or indications of accountability of the demonstrators.

The scenario, however, is one of insecurity. The increase in policing and the prospect of opening new investigations reinforces the hostile atmosphere to new protests, traditionally rare in China. To Reuters, for example, a university student said that he and his colleagues are deleting all conversation history in messaging applications.

Due to its territorial reach —now beyond China’s borders—, the wave of protests has already been considered the most important in the Asian country since the 1989 demonstrations, marked by the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Although unusual and quickly repressed and censored in China, acts against the regime and, specifically, against Xi, have drawn attention to Beijing since the week before the Communist Party Congress, in which the leader was crowned with an unprecedented third term. . At the time, posters scattered in some parts of Beijing called him a dictator and a traitor.

The Chinese regime chooses to maintain the zero Covid policy, with harsh restrictions on freedom and circulation, as its main strategy to contain the effects of the pandemic – despite the economic impact and criticism from entities such as the WHO, whose director-general classified the unsustainable measures.

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