Hundreds of people protest Covid lockdown at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, witness says

BEIJING, Nov. 27 — Hundreds of students from Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University took part in a protest against the Covid lockdown today, an eyewitness told AFP, social media footage showed.

The protests in Tsinghua followed overnight demonstrations at neighboring Peking University, and videos have gone viral on social media of similar rallies in other Chinese cities.

A student from Tsinghua University told AFP: Now we have 200-300 people. ”

Witnesses said one female student held up a blank sheet of paper in a symbolic protest against censorship, and other women doing the same joined in.

“We sang the national anthem and the international, chanting ‘freedom wins’, ‘no nucleic acid testing, we want food’ and ‘against lockdown, we want freedom’,” they said.

They shared a photo with AFP showing a large group of people gathered in the courtyard outside the Zijingyuan dining room in Tsinghua, some holding papers.

A corresponding video shared online showed a crowd in the same location gathering around the speaker and yelling: Our lives weren’t like this before! “

Another video, apparently shot at the same location, showed students shouting “democracy, the rule of law, freedom of expression,” but was quickly deleted.

Witnesses told AFP that the deputy secretary of the Communist Party at the school was talking to the students and that many had started to leave.

They said the police had not yet arrived on the scene. — AFP