SHANGHAI, China: China’s censors were working on Monday to extinguish signs of rare, social media-driven protests that flared across major cities over the weekend calling for political freedoms and an end to coronavirus lockdowns.

Sunday saw people take to the streets in several major cities across the East Asian country to call for an end to lockdowns and greater political freedoms, in a wave of nationwide protests not seen since pro-democracy rallies in 1989 were crushed.

A deadly fire last week in Urumqi, the capital of northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, has become a catalyst for public anger, with many blaming Covid lockdowns for hampering rescue efforts.

But they have also featured prominent calls for greater political freedoms. Some even demanded the resignation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was recently reappointed for an unprecedented third term as the country’s leader during a Communist Party congress last month.

Large crowds gathered on Sunday in the capital Beijing and financial hub Shanghai, where police clashed with protesters as they tried to stop groups from converging at Wulumuqi street, named after the Mandarin for Urumqi.

Crowds that had gathered overnight — some of whom chanted “Xi Jinping, step down! CCP (Chinese Communist Party), step down!” — were dispersed by Sunday morning.

But in the afternoon, hundreds rallied in the same area with blank sheets of paper and flowers to hold what appeared to be a silent protest, an eyewitness told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

In the capital, at least 400 people gathered on the banks of a river for several hours, with some shouting: “We are all Xinjiang people! Go Chinese people!”

AFP reporters at the scene described the crowd singing the national anthem and listening to speeches, while on the other side of the canal bank, a line of police cars waited.

An AFP journalist at the scene of the Shanghai protests on Monday morning saw a substantial police presence, with blue fences in place along the pavements to stop further gatherings.

State censors appeared to have scrubbed Chinese social media of any news about the rallies, with the search terms “Liangma River,” “Urumqi Road” — sites of protests in Beijing and Shanghai — scrubbed of any reference to the rallies on the Twitter-like Weibo platform.

Videos including those showing university students singing in protest and rallies in other cities had also vanished from WeChat, replaced by notices saying the content was reported for “noncompliant or sensitive content.”

The Weibo search for the hashtag #A4 — a reference to the blank pieces of paper held up at rallies in a symbolic protest against censorship — also appeared to have been manipulated, showing only a handful of posts from the past day.

‘Boiling point’

China’s strict control of information and continued travel curbs tied to its severe zero-Covid policy make verifying the numbers of protestors across the vast country challenging.

But such widespread rallies are exceptionally rare, with authorities harshly clamping down on any and all opposition to the central government.

Protests also occurred on Sunday in the city of Wuhan in central Hubei province, where Covid-19 first emerged, while there were reports of demonstrations in Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hong Kong.

Spreading through social media, they have been fueled by frustration at zero-Covid, which sees authorities impose snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and mass testing campaigns over just a handful of cases.

The state-run People’s Daily newspaper published a commentary on Monday morning warning against “paralysis” and “battle-weariness” in the fight against Covid, but stopped far short of calling for an end to the hardline policy.

“People have now reached a boiling point because there has been no clear direction to path to end the zero Covid policy,” Alfred Wu Muluan, a Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore, told AFP. “The party has underestimated the people’s anger.”

China reported 40,052 domestic Covid-19 cases on Monday — a record high, but tiny compared to caseloads in the West at the height of the pandemic.