The demonstrations, billed as the biggest showcase of dissent in mainland China since the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy rallies, also saw rare public calls for the removal of President Xi Jinping with some daring protesters holding up blank sheets of paper to highlight a lack of freedom of speech.
“If people are willing to take to the street, especially in China where there’s so many risks associated with this sort of protest … then it reflects that it’s not a small number of people who are discontented with the lockdown and all the Covid measures,” said Kevin Slaten, a researcher on Chinese protest movements at Freedom House, a US-based advocacy group.
The sight of tens of thousands of people hitting the streets is rare in China, and unrest usually draws a harsh response from the country’s security apparatus.
But this week’s protests are not the only backlash against strict Covid curbs during the pandemic, and they are far from the only example of unrest over the past few decades, although many protests attract little notice.
Between 1990 and March 2020, China saw 189 public demonstrations where 50 or more people participated, according to mass mobilisation data compiled by researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Notre Dame.
Those protests covered a wide range of issues, from land conflicts and labour issues to police brutality and rising consumer prices.
About half were linked to political issues, including calls for better treatment of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities.
A surge in demonstrations in 2008 saw unrest break out in Chinese-controlled Tibet, and protests over poor building construction in the wake of the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
In September, the deadly crash of a bus ferrying people to an isolation facility in southwestern Guizhou Province triggered widespread online protest.
The following month, a lone man unfurled two banners covered in anti-government slogans on a bridge in Beijing just days before China’s top leadership meeting. His quick arrest prompted people to share photos of the incident with the remark “I saw it” in an oblique show of support.
This year, angry homeowners launched a nationwide mortgage-payment strike over unfinished homes, unrest broke out n response to a banking scandal in rural Henan province and there was a backlash over footage showing men assaulting women at a restaurant in the northeastern city of Tangshan.
More recently, there were at least 27 demonstrations across 15 Chinese regions between Friday and Sunday, according to Slaten at Freedom House.
But dissent has been simmering for months over Covid curbs, including during Shanghai’s gruelling two-month virus lockdown earlier this year and also unrest in shuttered districts of manufacturing hub Guangzhou last month.
China Dissent Monitor, a protest-tracking database managed by Slaten and his team, recorded 822 examples between May 18 and Nov 22, including protest posts online and small-scale cases of public dissent.
Nikkei’s analysis found about 320 of those cases targeted the government including over its Covid policy and a crisis in the property market.
During the February 2020 lockdown of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first identified, a protest using emojis to skirt China’s army of censors was launched in response to the death of Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist whose attempts to warn about the first known infections were suppressed.
Since Xi’s rise to power a decade ago, expressing public dissent in China has become considerably more difficult and the risk of arrest or worse is severe.
Security officials monitor the country’s 1.4 billion citizens with a sophisticated surveillance and censorship system including using facial recognition technology in ubiquitous street cameras and linking people’s identity to their phone numbers, which are used for nearly all online services.
According to leaked censorship directives published on Nov 29 by China Digital Times, the country’s internet regulator urged media to suppress news of Covid protests and for all platforms to “carry out a thorough clean up and regulation of tools used to bypass the Firewall,” referencing China’s internet censorship efforts.
Chinese officials have not publicly acknowledged the widespread anger. But the ruling Communist Party’s central political and legal affairs commission this week stressed that strong measures were needed to safeguard national security and social stability.
“We must resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces in accordance with the law, resolutely crack down on illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order and effectively maintain overall social stability,” Chen Wenqing, the commission head and former security chief, told the meeting.
In recent days, some protesters have reportedly been arrested and others have gone missing, while police are stopping pedestrians to search their phones to see if they have virtual private networks or other banned apps such as Twitter or Telegram, according to eyewitnesses. One lawyer helping those arrested said police have accused them of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – a catchall allegation often levied against dissidents.
Many protests in China fizzle out and critics say most do little to change the status quo.
Still, pandemic officials have signalled plans to further ease Covid controls in an apparent nod to the pressure. And the latest bout of unrest could mark a pivotal moment for many, including among disaffected youth.
“The mobilisation process is far more important than outcomes. The majority of social movements do not lead to immediate changes. But the participation itself means a hopeful future for China,” Yan Long, an assistant professor who studies China’s social movements at the University of California Berkeley, wrote on Twitter. “They create longer-term new moral understandings and commitments against dictatorship.”