China’s Covid protests takes turn as tyrant Xi sends in tanks and shock troops

Chinese President Xi Jinping has ratcheted up his response to anti-lockdown protestors by sending in tanks to suppress them.

Demonstrations have continued in Beijing and Shanghai as police launched a crackdown following a weekend of dissent in a number of major cities.

The country continues to pursue a zero Covid policy which has regularly seen it lock down millions of people at a moment's notice over the past few years.

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However, as China’s Covid rates skyrocket past record levels and the rest of the world lives openly and freely with the virus, the public have grown sick of Xi Jinping’s crackdowns.

A silent protest saw people hold aloft blank sheets of paper and flowers in Shanghai on Sunday, while further smaller incidents were reported in the capital.

Shanghai police had used pepper spray on Saturday night against about 300 protesters after large crowds of people held aloft protest signs and began chanting anti-lockdown slogans.

But now, it looks like Xi – who has been president of the People's Republic of China since 2013 – has mobilized a column of tanks after they were spotted in the eastern city of Xuzhou.

The scenes could become reminiscent of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests when China said that 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel had died in Beijing following the suppression of “counter-revolutionary riots”.

Other estimates of the deaths in the pro-democracy protests ranged from several hundred to more than 1,000.

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Popular US-based opposition blogger Fang Shimin wrote online: “Are they going to Shanghai?”

Protests were fanned by fury over a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region that saw ten people reportedly die, including a child, after they were allegedly confined to an apartment block because of Covid measures.

The last few days have been rocked by protests demanding an end to the Covid crackdown and justice for those who died in the fire.

Even in Wuhan, where the pandemic originated from, thousands of people took to the street chanting 'open up the city'.

Whilst many were there at the protest to memorialise the lost, countless signs protested the Covid lockdown with slogans including: ‘Xi Jinping, step down, Communist Party, step down’, ‘Unlock Xinjiang, unlock China’. ‘do not want PCR (tests), want freedom’ and ‘press freedom’.

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