The spark started at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, which manufactures Iphones, on 22 November. Hundreds of workers demonstrated en masse to denounce the non-payment of bonuses and more than drastic health conditions. This was all it took for the protest movement to spread like wildfire in many cities across the country. The cause is the “zero covid” policy, which has put China under economic and social pressure for too long and which, due to the low efficiency of the Chinese vaccine, does not prevent the epidemic.

An unprecedented and unexpected fact: Xi Jinping, just re-elected as head of the Chinese Communist Party, is directly targeted by the demonstrators with the cry of “Down with Xi Jinping!” The repression of this discontent was obviously not made to wait, even if some measures of lightening of the lockdown have just been evoked by the cornered authorities.

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