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HONG KONG/ When Yang, a Shanghai office worker, saw video clips of a burning building in western China, a disaster in which 10 people were killed, she said she could not contain her anger over tough COVID-19 measures three years into the pandemic.
Watching a World Cup soccer match in a Shanghai bar two days later with her boyfriend, she spotted calls on WeChat, China’s ubiquitous messaging app, for a public gathering to mourn the victims. She rushed over by bicycle to attend.
“Things reached a tipping point, we had to come out,” Yang, 32, who declined to be identified by her full name given fear of reprisals, told Reuters.
Six young people who spoke to Reuters from four cities across China — all dipping their toes in activism for the first time — describe a mix of elation, fear, and defiance after a restive weekend and a tightening of security.
While united against China’s stifling “zero-COVID” measures, all six also spoke of a yearning for broader political freedoms, 33 years after students occupied China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
When Yang arrived at the gathering, small crowds were heckling ranks of police deployed beneath the mottled plane trees of Wulumuqi Road, named after Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region where the fire occurred.
Authorities have denied the deaths in the fire were linked to lockdown measures that blocked the victims’ escape.
“We don’t want masks, we want freedoms,” Yang chanted, using her phone to share pictures, videos and posts over Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram — apps not accessible on the mainland without a virtual private network, that she’d installed.
As the hours wore on, chants grew bolder.
“Down with the Chinese Communist Party,” people chanted, some casting off their masks. “Down with Xi Jinping!”
But much of the public frustration is directed at President Xi’s signature zero-COVID policy, rather than at him or the ruling party.
