AUSTRALIA LOCKDOWN ARRESTS SERIES

A student told AFP that some students had held up a blank piece of paper near the canteen at about 11.30am, and that 200 to 300 people had joined them by the afternoon. Photos and videos circulated on social media seen by the Guardian were quickly removed by internet censors, but many continued to circulate on Twitter, which is blocked in China.Ĭrowdsourced lists on social media claim protests have been documented at as many as 50 Chinese universities over the weekend.Īt Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University, students shouted “freedom will prevail” and called for an end to lockdowns on Sunday, while people holding a peaceful riverside vigil defied police orders to move on.

Widespread in-person protests are rare in China, where dissent has been all but eliminated under Xi, forcing citizens mostly to vent their frustrations on social media where they play cat-and-mouse games with censors. Police watch protesters in Shanghai on Saturday, in a screengrab taken from video. Many people are gathered here quietly watching. He wrote: “I’m at the scene of last night’s extraordinary anti Covid-zero protest in Shanghai. Lawrence, a senior journalist and camera operator for the BBC’s China bureau, was tweeting from the scene of the protest in Shanghai on Sunday morning UK time. “He was held for several hours before being released,” the spokesperson said, adding that Lawrence had been covering the protests as an accredited journalist.

Footage on social media showed Edward Lawrence being dragged to the ground in handcuffs, while he was seen saying in another video: “Call the consulate now.”Ī BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC is extremely concerned about the treatment of our journalist Ed Lawrence, who was arrested and handcuffed while covering the protests in Shanghai. Late on Sunday, a BBC journalist was seen on camera being “beaten and kicked by police” before being arrested in the city. A photograph which quickly went viral on Sunday night appeared to show police removing the Middle Urumqi Road street sign. Police closed the street to non-local traffic and made arrests, according to videos online.

AUSTRALIA LOCKDOWN ARRESTS SERIES

In Shanghai, China’s biggest city and a global financial hub, crowds returned to Middle Urumqi Road – named after the Xinjiang capital – for a second day on Sunday, despite a series of widely documented arrests the day before. Many of Urumqi’s 4 million residents have been under some of the country’s longest lockdowns, barred from leaving their homes for as long as 100 days. Urumqi officials abruptly held a news conference in the early hours of Saturday to deny Covid measures had hampered escape and rescue. The protests erupted on Friday in Urumqi, the regional capital of the far west Xinjiang region, after footage of a fire in a residential building that killed at least 10 people the day before led to accusations that a Covid lockdown was a factor in the death toll.

Australia lockdown arrests