Residents ‘revolt’ over oppressive Covid lockdowns in China’s Guangzhou


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Residents under Covid lockdown in China’s southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou have torn down barriers meant to confine them to their homes, taking to the streets in defiance of strictly enforced local orders, according to video and images circulating on social media.


Some of the images show large crowds cheering and surging across toppled barriers and filling streets after dark in the city’s Haizhu district, which has been under an increasingly restrictive lockdown since November 5, as the epicenter of the city’s ongoing Covid outbreak.


The clanging sound of metal barriers falling reverberates across the neighborhood and mingles with cheers in the footage, in scenes multiple social media users said took place late Monday evening on district streets.


In one video, Covid workers in protective medical wear can be seen standing on the sidelines as barriers fall, while trying to speak with people on the streets. “They’re revolting,” a woman’s voice is heard saying in the background of one of the videos. CNN has geolocated the images to Haizhu district, but could not independently confirm them.


It is not clear how many people were involved in the protest, or how long it lasted. Related posts were swiftly scrubbed from the Chinese internet by censors.


When CNN reached the phone line of the Haizhu District government office, a phone operator said that the area was still “largely closed off”.


When asked whether protests took place in recent days, the operator declined to answer.


The public protest – an exceedingly rare event in China, where authorities keep tight control over dissent – appears as yet another sign of the mounting public anger and desperation over the government’s stringent zero-Covid policies.


The scenes in Guangzhou, which reported over 5,100 new Covid cases on Tuesday – the vast majority asymptomatic – come as Beijing’s unrelenting drive to stamp out the spread of the virus faces questions of sustainability, amid fast-spreading new variants.

MORE/VIDEO China zero-Covid: Guangzhou residents '''revolt''' over oppressive lockdowns | CNN