For three years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, fought a remorseless battle against COVID-19. He called it a “people’s war”—a national struggle to defeat an unseen foe and save lives. The contest locked families in their homes for weeks, strangled the economy, and closed the country to the world. Other governments that failed to contain the pandemic may be indifferent to death and suffering, the message was, but not the Chinese Communist Party, which cares about life above all else.
Exactly three years ago, the first known covid cases were spreading quietly in Wuhan, the city of 11 million in central China that would become ground zero for the pandemic. A month later, in January 2020, the government placed the whole city under lockdown; people were allowed to leave their homes to buy groceries only every few days. This first covid lockdown was in place for two-and-a-half months, but its impact lasted far longer. The Wuhan response worked — caseloads and deaths dropped — and it became the model for China’s infamous “zero-covid” strategy to control the pandemic.
— Read on www.grid.news/story/global/2022/12/08/inside-wuhan-how-chinas-ground-zero-for-covid-hit-its-zero-covid-tipping-point/
… Youth unemployment, millions of people on lockdown and falling growth: The pandemic has made the flaws of China’s autocracy clear, writes columnist Alain Frachon. …
More and more apartment compounds in Beijing on Friday forbade residents from leaving for at least a few days.
“You constantly hear of someone going into lockdown and you have this constant feeling that you’re going to be next,” Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, said Friday.
It was not clear how many people were affected at a city level, and to what degree stay-in-place measures were being enforced.
People in the Chinese manufacturing hub of Guangzhou clashed with white hazmat-suited riot police on Tuesday night, online videos showed, the latest in a string of protests that escalated over the weekend over stringent Covid-19 lockdowns.
The clashes, which follow protests in Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere, erupted as China posts record numbers of Covid cases daily and health officials, including in the southern region around Guangzhou, announced a slight loosening of the curbs.
Mainland China’s biggest wave of civil disobedience since the 1989 Tiananmen protests comes as its economy sputters after growing at breakneck rates for decades.
That era of prosperity was fundamental for the social contract between the Communist Party and a population whose freedoms have been dramatically curtailed since President Xi Jinping took power 10 years ago…….
Protests are spreading across the globe as people in China try to break out of quarantine. These are the largest public protests China has seen in decades.. See more videos about Videos, China, Coronavirus (China), Coronavirus (Asia), Coronavirus (COVID-19), China Protests. — Read on flipboard.com/video/businessinsider/fa0d54e9f6