China’s protests against Covid-19 restrictions that began over the weekend appear to be winding down, as authorities begin to clamp down.
A heavy police presence has been reported in several cities, and some gatherings have been contained or disrupted.
There have been reports of people being questioned and their phones being searched.
But overseas Chinese have continued to protest in at least a dozen cities around the world.
Last weekend’s protests escalated after 10 people died in a fire at a high-rise block in the western Chinese region of Urumqi on Thursday.
It is widely believed that residents were unable to escape the fire due to Covid restrictions, but local authorities have disputed this.
As a result, thousands of people took to the streets for days, demanding 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.
Police could be seen patrolling areas in both cities on Tuesday morning where some groups on the Telegram social media app advised people to gather again.
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.
But in Hong Kong, dozens of protesters gathered in the centre of the city and at the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a show of solidarity with demonstrators in mainland China.
Many also gathered outside Chinese embassies in major cities around the world like London, Paris and Tokyo, and universities in the US and Europe.
One expert suggested that local protests were not likely to die down any time soon, saying they were likely to “ebb and flow” because people were “not being called out to the streets in a controlled fashion… they move between social media and the street”.
But Drew Thompson, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, added that it was also important to note that Chinese police had “tremendous capacity…[and] the ability of China to control these protests going forward… is quite high”.
