Police at the site of an earlier protest against Covid-19 curbs, in Shanghai, China, November 27 2022. Picture: JOSH HORWITZ/REUTERS
There was no sign of new protests on Monday in Beijing or Shanghai, but dozens of police were in the areas where the weekend demonstrations took place. The zero-Covid policy has kept China’s official death toll in the thousands, against more than a million in the US, but has come at the cost of confining many millions to long spells at home, bringing extensive disruption and damage to the world’s second-largest economy.
“The demonstrations do not imminently threaten the existing political order, but they do mean the current Covid policy mix is no longer politically sustainable,” analysts at Gavekal Dragonomics wrote in a note.Blue barriers