//While local protests in China over environmental, labour and land disputes are not uncommon, the rare wave of blank-paper protests that spilled across China’s wealthiest cities – all targeting President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy – represents a challenge of the type the country’s leaders have not faced for decades.

The protests erupted last weekend after a fire at a residential block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, claimed 10 lives.

…Fang Kecheng, assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the deaths had fuelled “the public’s anxiety over whether their children too would be trapped and their fire exits would be blocked too during lockdowns”.

Fang added: “The Urumqi fire, to them, is a symbol of resonating traumatic experiences.”

“The protests really show that earlier public support towards the government in 2020 and 2021 was really performance-based rather than blindly centralised to a certain ideology or leader,” Fang said. //