• About 100 police stood line by line, preventing some protesters from gathering or leaving, and buses with more police arrived later
Taipei :
Protests against China's restrictive COVID-19 measures appeared to roil several cities on Saturday night in a show of public defiance fueled by anger over a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region.
Several protests could not be immediately confirmed, but in Shanghai, police used pepper spray to disperse about 300 protesters who gathered on central Urumqi Road past midnight, carrying flowers, candles and signs The signs read "Urumqi, November 24th, may those who died rest in peace" to commemorate the 10 deaths caused by a fire at an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
One protester, who gave only his family name Zhao, said one of his friends was beaten by police and two friends were pepper-sprayed. He said the police stomped his feet as he tried to stop them from taking away his friend. He lost his shoes in the process, and left the protest barefoot.
Zhao says the protesters chanted "Xi Jinping, step down, Communist Party, step down", "Unlock Xinjiang, unlock China", "PCR (do not want testing), want freedom" and "Press freedom". Slogans like
Zhao said about 100 police stood in line, preventing some protesters from gathering or leaving, and that later buses with more police arrived.
Another protester, who gave only his family name Xu, said that there was a large crowd of thousands of protesters, but the police stood on the street and allowed the protesters to pass through the sidewalk.
Posts about the protests on China's social media were immediately removed, as China's Communist Party usually does to stifle criticism.
Earlier on Saturday, authorities in the Xinjiang region opened some neighborhoods in Urumqi after residents held extraordinary late-night demonstrations against the city's draconian "zero-Covid" lockdown, which has lasted more than three months.
Many alleged that the barriers caused by anti-virus measures made the fires worse. It took three hours for emergency crews to extinguish the fire, but officials denied the allegations, saying there were no barricades in the building and residents were allowed to leave.
During Xinjiang's lockdown, some residents elsewhere in the city physically barricaded their doors, including a man who spoke to The Associated Press who declined to be named for fear of retribution . Many in Urumqi believe that such brute-force tactics may have prevented residents from escaping in Thursday's fire and that the official death toll was an underestimate.
Anger boiled over after Urumqi city officials held a press conference about the fire, in which they appeared to blame the deaths on residents of the apartment tower.
"Some residents' ability to defend themselves was too weak," said Li Wensheng, head of Urumqi's fire department.
Police cracked down on voices of protest, announcing the arrest of a 24-year-old woman for spreading "false information" online.
Late on Friday, people in Urumqi marched peacefully in large puffy winter jackets on a chilly night.
Videos of the protests showed people holding Chinese flags and chanting "open up, open up". They spread quickly on Chinese social media, despite heavy censorship. In some scenes, people shouted and pushed against queues of men in white full-body hazmat suits. Local government employees and epidemic-prevention volunteers wear them, according to the video.
By Saturday, most had been removed by the censors. The Associated Press could not independently verify all the videos, but two Urumqi residents, who declined to be named for fear of retribution, said Friday night saw massive protests. One of them said he had friends who attended.
The AP identified the locations of the two videos as protests in different parts of Urumqi. In one video, police in face masks and hospital gowns were confronted by shouting protesters. In another, a protester is speaking to a crowd about their demands. It is unclear how widespread the protest was.
The demonstrations, as well as online public anger, are the latest signs of growing frustration with China's in-depth approach to controlling COVID-19. It is the only major country in the world that is still fighting the pandemic through mass testing and lockdown.
Protests are risky anywhere in the country, given China's vast security apparatus, but they are exceptional in Xinjiang, which has been the target of a brutal security crackdown for years. Vast numbers of Uyghurs and other sizeable Muslim minorities were herded into a vast network of camps and prisons that continue to grip the region to this day.
Most of the protesters seen in the video were Han Chinese. A Uyghur woman living in Urumqi said
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