Beijing: Chinese universities are sending students home as the ruling Communist Party tightens anti-virus controls and angry crowds over its severe ‘zero COVID’ restrictions push President Xi Jinping to resign in the biggest show of public discontent After tried to prevent more protests. decade. With no police force, there was no word of protests Tuesday in Beijing, Shanghai or other major cities. At least eight cities eased some anti-virus restrictions on Monday in a possible attempt to calm public anger after a weekend of protests. But the ruling party reaffirmed its Zero COVID strategy, which has confined millions of people to their homes in an effort to isolate every infection. Tsinghua University, Xi’s alma mater, where students protested on Sunday, and other schools in Beijing and the southern province of Guangdong said they were shielding students from COVID-19. But dispersing them into far-flung hometowns also leaves little room for more activism after last weekend’s campus protests.
Some universities arranged buses to take students to train stations. He said that the classes and final exams would be conducted online. “We will arrange for interested students to return to their hometowns,” Beijing Forestry University said on its website. It said its faculty and students all tested negative for the virus.
The campuses were centers of activism during the last push for democratic reforms in the 1980s, which culminated in the 1989 student-led movement centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which was crushed by the military.
“By sending the students home, the authorities hope to calm the situation,” said Dali Yang, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “For students, there has been a lockdown on campus for months. For others, of course, job prospects have been destroyed, businesses and despair have increased. There has been a lot of anxiety,” Yang said.
Authorities have ordered mass testing and implemented other controls in regions across China following a spike in infections. But the move to disperse the students was unusual at a time when many cities are asking the public to avoid travel and imposing movement controls.
In Hong Kong, about 50 students from mainland China protested on Monday at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in support of people on the mainland. They lit candles and raised slogans, ‘No PCR test but freedom!’ and ‘Resist dictatorship, don’t be a slave!’
The gathering in Hong Kong’s business district and similar protests in a Chinese territory were the biggest in more than a year under rules imposed to crush the pro-democracy movement. Zero Covid has helped keep China’s case numbers low compared to the United States and other major countries. But public acceptance has waned as people in some areas have been confined at home for four months and say they do not have reliable access to food and medicine.
The Chinese Communist Party last month promised to ease the disruption by changing quarantine and other rules. But a surge in infections has prompted cities to tighten controls, sparking public despair. The number of new coronavirus cases fell slightly to 38,421 on Tuesday after setting new records in recent days. Of these, 34,860 showed no symptoms.
While China’s numbers are low compared to the US and other countries, few Chinese have been exposed to the virus and China’s domestically developed vaccines are thought to be far less effective than those used abroad. Officials are believed to fear a wave of infections and deaths that could overwhelm the health care system if they were to lift “zero COVID” measures.
Most of the protesters complained about excessive restrictions, but some directed their anger at Xi, China’s most powerful leader since at least the 1980s. In a video verified by The Associated Press, a crowd in Shanghai on Saturday chanted, ‘Xi Jinping! to resign! CCP! to resign!’
On Monday, Beijing’s city government announced it would no longer install gates to block access to apartment complexes where infections are found.
It made no mention of a fire in Urumqi last week that killed at least 10 people. It prompted angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims were blocked by locked doors or other anti-virus controls from trying to escape.
Urumqi and another city in the Xinjiang region to the northwest announced that markets and other businesses in areas with a low risk of infection would reopen this week and public bus service would resume.
“The Urumqi fire provided the trigger for people to go outside to express themselves,” Yang said. He added that depending on how hard the government takes, the protests could continue on a “rotational” basis, with new groups joining on a rotational basis.
Sympathy protests were organized abroad, and foreign governments have called on Beijing for restraint.
Asked about the protests at Monday’s briefing, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that “obviously, there are people in China who have concerns about this,” referring to the lockdown. “These protesters are speaking for themselves,” Kirby said. “What we are doing is making it clear that we support the right to peaceful protest.”