People in China who took part in weekend protests against the Covid restrictions say they have been approached by police, as authorities begin to crack down on them.
Several people in Beijing said the police had called asking for information about their whereabouts.
It is not clear how the police may have discovered their identities.
On Tuesday, officials renewed their pledge to step up efforts to vaccinate older people. Vaccination rates among the elderly are relatively low.
China has recorded a record number of new cases in recent days.
Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in China to demand an end to the Covid lockdown – with some even making rare calls for President Xi Jinping to step down.
But on Monday, a planned protest in Beijing did not take place after officers cordoned off the assembly point. Large roadblocks were erected along the main protest route in Shanghai and police made several arrests.
The protests began after 10 people died in a fire at a high-rise block in the western Chinese region of Urumqi on Thursday. Many Chinese believe that Covid restrictions played a role in the deaths, although officials deny this.
Asked if the protests would signal a change in zero-covid laws, an official said China would continue to “fine-tune and modify” its measures.
“We are going to contain and control the negative impact on people’s livelihoods and lives,” Mi Feng, a spokeswoman for the National Health Commission, said at a press conference.
On Tuesday morning, police could be seen patrolling areas in both Beijing and Shanghai where some groups on the Telegram messaging app advised people to regroup.
A small protest in the southern city of Hangzhou on Monday night was also quickly quelled with people being swiftly arrested, according to social media footage verified by JEE News.
Reports also said police were stopping people and searching their phones to see if they had virtual private networks (VPNs) set up, as well as apps like Telegram and Twitter, which are blocked in China.
A woman told JEE News that she and five friends who attended a protest in Beijing had received phone calls from the police.
In one case, a police officer visited his friend’s home after he failed to answer his phone and asked if he had visited the protest site, insisting that it was a was an “unlawful assembly”.
Another told Reuters he was asked to appear at a police station on Sunday night to provide a written record of his activities.
“We’re all frantically deleting our chat history,” one protester in Beijing told Reuters. “The police came to check the ID of one of my friends and then took him away. A few hours later they released him.”
Police have also detained journalists covering the protests in recent days. Reuters news agency said one of its journalists was briefly detained on Sunday before being released.
JEE News journalist was also detained for several hours while covering a protest in Shanghai that night. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said his detention was “shocking and unacceptable”, adding that Britain would raise concerns with China about its response to the protests.
