Show of force keeps Chinese protesters at bay

China has ramped up a campaign to erase the memory of a wave of anti-government protests.

Protesters march along a street during a rally for the victims of a deadly fire as well as a protest against China's harsh Covid-19 restrictions in Beijing on Monday night. Picture: AFP

Beijing has ramped up a campaign to erase the memory of a wave of anti-government protests, as it widened its investigations of students involved and claimed “foreign forces” were ­behind the country’s biggest demonstrations since Tiananmen.

In the first government comments on the unprecedented unrest, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman claimed there had not been a mass outbreak of dissent over President Xi Jinping’s hardline “Covid-zero” policy.

“What you mentioned does not reflect what actually happened,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

“We believe that with the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and co-operation and support of the Chinese people, our fight against Covid-19 will be successful.”

A huge wave of police flooded China’s streets on Monday night to halt what would have been a third night of national protests, as censors scrubbed images and blocked search terms of the weekend’s unrest.

Police cars and vans parked along a street in Beijing on Monday, after protesters gathered in various cities over the weekend. Picture: AFP

Many of the protesters ­detained had their phones confiscated by police, who searched them for VPNs that allow users to breach China’s Great Firewall of internet censorship. The police also looked for the Telegram app, which had been used to organise protests in Hong Kong in 2019.

One Chinese lawyer familiar with some of those detentions said police were conducting ­investigations to see “the ­motives” of the protesters.

“And to see if there are ‘foreign forces’ behind them,” the lawyer told The Australian.

China’s media has not reported at all on the public demonstrations.

However, some prominent government-supported social media accounts have claimed “foreign forces” had stirred the unrest.

Police cars and vans choked main streets in the capital and Shanghai on Monday, in a successful attempt to quell protests of public anger, sparked by Thursday’s deadly fire in the northwestern city of Urumqi, where residents blamed Covid measures for hampering rescue efforts.

“The atmosphere tonight is nervy. There are so many police around,” a man in his early 30s said in Shanghai early on Monday night.

“Taku” said he had lost his job at an international airline because of the pandemic and that he thought the protests were ­justified.

“The rest of the world has opened up, but only China is stuck with the zero-Covid policy … This city at the moment just feels crazy,” he said.

At least a dozen police cars lined one street in central Shanghai, with several blocks covered with blue metal barriers that had been erected overnight.

Ten minutes’ drive away, the vast People’s Square appeared closed off and bars in the area had been ordered to close at 10pm for “disease control”.

There was a heightened security presence around the city government building near the square, with dozens of police vans and mobile units parked along the road.

In Beijing, although there was no sign of the rowdy rallies of the previous two nights, many expressed defiant support for the demonstrations.

Police patrolled nearby on both banks of the Liangma River in small groups every five minutes or so, standing out in their navy blue uniforms. Twenty cars and police vans were parked nearby, some equipped with cameras, making any gathering almost ­impossible.

Other politically sensitive places in Beijing, such as Tiananmen Square – the focal point of the major protests in 1989 that were later brutally crushed – were ­deserted on Monday.

Additional reporting: AFP