• People in China who participated in protests over the weekend against Covid restrictions claim that police have approached them as the government tightens its controls.
• Officials pledged again on Tuesday to move more quickly to vaccinate senior citizens.
• Additionally, police have recently detained journalists who have been covering the protests.

People in China who participated in protests over the weekend against Covid restrictions claim that police have approached them as the government tightens its controls.

Beijing residents reported that police had contacted and asked for their locations.

How the cops might have learned their identities is unknown. Officials pledged again on Tuesday to move more quickly to vaccinate senior citizens. The proportion of older persons who receive vaccines is generally low.

China has recently seen unprecedented levels of new cases. Thousands of people in China protested in the streets over the weekend, calling for an end to Covid lockdowns. Some even made the unusual call for President Xi Jinping to step aside.

But as police encircled the rallying area on Monday, Beijing’s planned protests were postponed. Along the major demonstration route in Shanghai, substantial obstacles were put up, and police arrested a number of people.

Ten people were murdered on Thursday in a fire that broke out in a high-rise building in Urumqi, western China, sparking the protests. Although the authorities dispute this, many Chinese think that Covid limitations were a factor in the deaths.

An official responded that China will continue to “fine-tune and adapt” its measures when asked if the demonstrations would result in a modification to the zero-Covid guidelines.

Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission, stated at a news conference that “We are going to preserve and limit the negative impact on people’s livelihoods and lifestyles.”

Police were observed on Tuesday morning in Beijing and Shanghai guarding locations where certain Telegram chat groups had urged people to congregate once more.

According to social media, a tiny protest that occurred on Monday night in the southern city of Hangzhou was similarly rapidly suppressed and participants were quickly detained.

According to reports, police were stopping people and looking through their phones to see if they were using virtual private networks (VPNs) or prohibited apps like Telegram and Twitter.

One woman claimed that the police had called her and five of her friends who had attended a protest in Beijing, according to the news agency.

In one instance, a policeman called her friend’s house after they didn’t pick up the phone and questioned if they had gone to the protest site, emphasizing that it was an “illegal assembly.”

Another person told Reuters that they received a request to give a written account of their Sunday night actions to a police station.

“We are all desperately deleting our chat history,” one Beijing protester told Reuters. “Police came to check the ID of one of my friends and then took her away. A few hours later they released her.”

Additionally, police have recently detained journalists who have been covering the protests. One of its reporters was briefly held on Sunday before being released, according to the news agency Reuters.

The same evening, news reporter Ed Lawrence was detained for several hours while covering a protest in Shanghai. Asserting that China’s handling of the protests was “shocking and unacceptable,” UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that his detention was.

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