Dozens of police cars with their red and blue lights waited outside a subway station in Haidian, the university district of beijing, chosen for the protest in an encrypted mobile application. Uniformed and undercover agents patrolled its entrances and there was also a freezing blizzard, so the young people who emerged from the escalators, assuming the hostile climate and a numerical inferiority that bordered on loneliness, concluded that there would be better opportunities to shout their laments against the zero covid policy. An equally harassing police presence has been deployed since dawn on Shanghai’s Urumqi Avenue. there they met agents, trucks and billboards raised to prevent the noise of the two previous nights. A BBC journalist was beaten, several young people were detained and proclamations were heard against the party and its general secretary, Xi Jinping.
The police deployment in the hottest areas prevented a repeat of the weekend protests. They were not in the majority, just a few hundred protesters, and they took place in a peaceful environment except for isolated incidents. But the social stability is non-negotiable in China and urged deactivate the contagion effect. Time will tell if the police are enough to stem the wave of discontent that especially concerns Xi, an enthusiastic defender of the policy. is the first social crisis with which the president with the most power in recent decades has to deal and it will be necessary to check his strength in difficulties. The Foreign Ministry this afternoon minimized the recent turbulence and accused foreign forces that he did not specify to stimulate them with spurious objectives.
More liniment than salt, that’s the formula. There is no shortage of popular outrage and the repression it would only accentuate it. Some of the measures approved this Monday smooth the most arid aspects of politics in cities with patience already diminished. In guangzhouthe southern macrocity, people in quarantine have been exempted from their daily PCR test. They had been mandatory for teachers and students, including those studying online, since October. In urumqithe provincial capital of xinjiang, buying, working and public transport in low-risk areas are already allowed for a population that adds up to three months with movement limitations. The reestablishment of some flights, in addition, has broken its isolation from the country.
greater flexibility
Beijing has prohibited fencing confined buildings, retiring the already iconic metallic blue barriers They appeared overnight. All the obstacles that block the fire exits and the community doors They must be withdrawn, the consistory has specified. The objective is to prevent tragedies such as the dozen deaths in a building in Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjiang, who were trapped during a fire. That was where the protests that spread over the weekend to half a dozen cities in the country were born on Thursday night.
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The new mantra alludes to the “optimization and refinement” of the strategy. High-risk areas will be smaller and limited to homes with confirmed cases, without the joyous expansion ordered by local government bodies to heal in health. The regulations persevere in the trend that Beijing already drew a couple of weeks ago, shortening the quarantine for primary contacts and exempting it for secondary ones. It is legitimate to wonder how far China can make its zero covid policy more flexible without reducing its effectiveness because the plan coincides with the worst case scenario. The Government is dealing this week with the largest wave of social discontent and with the biggest wave of infections dwarves. Today he already exceeded the bar of the 40,000 new cases after five days of consecutive records.
The Government is confident that the current measures will be enough to subside the storm, ruling out the comprehensive openings adopted by the West due to the certainty of a unaffordable mortality. It is not a very credible plan if we look at the increasing evolution of infections in recent months and the long confinements of cities as important as Guangzhou or Zhengzhou. The only certainty lies in the turbulent times that await China, forced to refine its strategies by the trial-error method and aware that there are not enough fences or police to silence the protests forever.