US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said that the Chinese government should respect the fundamental rights of people across China to peacefully protest the government’s draconian “zero Covid” restrictions. The rights group also called for freedom and human rights. It also demanded that the authorities should immediately release all wrongfully detained protesters and cease online censorship of protest-related information.
Over the weekend, thousands of people in Shanghai, China’s biggest city and financial center, began publicly protesting the government’s strict Covid-19 measures and denouncing the Chinese government’s authoritarian rule. University students across the country gathered on their campuses to demonstrate, and hundreds of people in Wuhan, where Covid-19 originated, Chengdu, Beijing, and other large cities, took to the streets.
The protest in China was in response to a fire on 24th November at an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwest Xinjiang region, in which at least 10 people were killed.