China sees widespread civil unrest over ‘devastating’ Covid lockdowns, police clash with fed-up protestors

The Chinese people are understandably fed-up with the CCP-controlled government’s so-called zero-COVID policy.

Protests against the authoritarian regime by the typically compliant citizenry have erupted in financial hub Shanghai and in other cities throughout the country over the past several days.

Video of clashes between thousands of protesters, in a country otherwise known for censoring dissent, and police quickly spread across social media.

According to the Associated Press, “Some of the most shared videos came from Shanghai, which had borne a devastating lockdown in spring in which people struggled to secure groceries and medicines and were forcefully taken into centralized quarantine.”

AP also noted that street demonstrations “are extremely rare” in China, but in this latest expression of dissatisfaction with the communist regime, they have also reportedly occurred in Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, and elsewhere across the vast country.

Cops deployed pepper spray in Shanghai (and perhaps in other localities) and made multiple arrests.

Protesters reportedly shouted, among other things, “We don’t want PCR tests, we want freedom,” “no more lockdowns,” and even called for President Xi Jinping, the country’s dictator, to step down.

President Xi Jinping’s government faces mounting anger at its ‘zero-COVID’ policy that has shut down access to areas throughout China in an attempt to isolate every case at a time when other governments are easing controls and trying to live with the virus,” AP separately reported.

The social unrest was reportedly prompted by the death of 10 persons in an apartment fire that occurred in Urumqi in the Xinjiang region “that the public believes was caused by excessive lockdown measures that delayed rescue,” the news agency noted.

The Urumqi area has been subject to an ongoing lockdown for the past three months.

“After three years of harsh lockdowns that have left people confined in their homes for weeks at a time, the Xinjiang fire appears to have finally broken through the Chinese public’s ability to tolerate the harsh measures,” AP reaffirmed.

Some would argue that what is occurring in China perhaps, in part, serves as a rebuke of other governments as well as corporate media organizations, including in the west, which inexplicably became enamored with the ruling CCP’s draconian restrictions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

China is reportedly either keeping them in place or reinstituting restrictions on its population because of an uptick in COVID “cases,” the Daily Mail reported.

“China [is] launching another mass crackdown on the virus with crippling lockdowns put in place across the country, nearly three years after the pandemic started there. The nation reported another 39,791 new cases spread across the country — the biggest one-day increase on record — including a record 4,307 in Beijing alone.”

This is a developing story.

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