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Tag: Guangzhou

  • China: Guangzhou driver causes five deaths after driving into crowds

    China: Guangzhou driver causes five deaths after driving into crowds

    A man who rammed his car into pedestrians in Guangzhou, killing five people and injuring 13, has been detained by Chinese police.

    Widespread public outrage over the incident has led many to accuse the man of deliberately picking on people.

    Soon after the collision, the driver is seen in videos posted online getting out of the vehicle and flinging bills into the air.

    The 22-year-old man is being held by police, who have also opened an investigation.

    In the southern city of 19 million people, the accident happened on Wednesday during the evening rush hour at a busy intersection.

    “He deliberately drove into the people who were waiting for the traffic light. He rammed the car into them maliciously. After that, he made a U-turn and hit people again,” an eyewitness told local outlet Hongxin News.

    “He wasn’t driving too quickly, but some people couldn’t run away in time because they wouldn’t have known he was hitting people deliberately.”

    The man also reportedly drove into a traffic police officer and his motorcycle, but the officer managed to escape.

    One widely circulated clip shows a young girl lying on the ground at the scene of the incident, while a woman said to be her mother is seen by her side wailing.

    Another eyewitness described the chaos of the aftermath on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. The person said that an hour after the incident, the site was still filled with ambulances and traffic police “and they had not moved all the injured and the bodies from the scene”.

    “The scene was too tragic and I couldn’t bear seeing it. I felt so sad that I wanted to throw up whenever I heard the siren of the ambulance,” the person said.

    The incident has sparked public anger, with many expressing sorrow that it happened in the lead-up to Chinese New Year, a time for family reunions.

    “The victims could be a girl who dressed up meticulously to go on a date… It could be a food deliveryman who earned five yuan after rushing an order. It could be a father who wanted to go home and have dinner with children. It could be a child who was happily shopping,” one Weibo user wrote.

    Many noted that the man drove a luxury car and had thrown money into the air, and asked if he came from a rich and powerful family.

    The incident quickly became a trending topic on Weibo on Wednesday, but it later disappeared from the “hot searches” list, leading users to accuse the platform of censorship.

    There have been similar recent incidents. In February 2022, a driver ploughed a mini truck into people in the southern province of Fujian, killing three and injuring nine.

    Earlier this week, a hotel guest in Shanghai deliberately drove his car into the lobby following an argument with staff. Nobody was injured in that incident.

    Source: BBC.com

  • China prompts ease in Covid policy after mass protests

    Despite high daily case numbers, China has signalled a shift in its Covid stance by moving to relax some virus restrictions.

    On Thursday, dozens of districts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, both of which have seen an increase in cases, were released from lockdown.

    The country’s vice-premier also declared that it was in a “new situation.”

    It comes as China faces widespread opposition to its zero-Covid policy.

    The unrest was triggered by a fire in a high-rise block in the western Xinjiang region that killed 10 people last week. Many Chinese believe long-running Covid restrictions in the city contributed to the deaths, although the authorities deny this.

    It led to days of widespread protests across various cities, which have since ebbed amid heavy a heavy police presence.

    Restrictions in major cities like Guangzhou were abrupted lifted on Wednesday, hours after the city saw violent protests that resulted in clashes between police and protesters.

    A community in the capital Beijing also allowed Covid cases with mild symptoms to isolate at home, according to a Reuters report – a far cry from protocols earlier this year which saw entire buildings and communities locked down, sometimes as a result of just one positive case.

    Other major cities like Shanghai and Chongqing also saw some rules relaxed.

    It comes as one of China’s most senior pandemic officials, vice-premier Sun Chunlan, said the virus’ ability to cause disease was weakening.

    “The country is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens, more people are vaccinated and experience in containing the virus is accumulated,” she said, according to a Reuters report.

    This comes in stark contrast to an earlier message from authorities that the country needed to maintain a strict zero-Covid policy.

    Former state media editor Hu Xijin, who now offers pro-Communist Party comments on Twitter, insisted the moves showed China was now “speeding up to cast aside large-scale lockdowns”.

    Following the lifting of lockdown measures in many parts of Guangzhou, Lijin Hong, an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University, said it would “take a while for the city to recover. Yet is is awesome to see Guangzhou city again.”

    China has in recent days recorded its highest number of daily Covid cases since the pandemic began – with more than 36,000 cases recorded on Wednesday.

    However, the numbers are still tiny for a country of 1.4 billion people and officially just over 5,200 have died since the pandemic began.

    That equates to three Covid deaths in every million in China, compared with 3,000 per million in the US and 2,400 per million in the UK, although direct comparisons between countries are difficult.

  • China zero Covid: Violent protests in Guangzhou put curbs under strain

    Crowds of residents in Guangzhou, southern China’s industrial metropolis, escaped a mandatory lockdown and clashed with police, as rage over strict coronavirus controls erupted.

    Some are seen overturning a police vehicle and tearing down Covid control barriers in dramatic footage. Riot squads have been dispatched to the area.

    It comes on the heels of Guangzhou’s worst Covid outbreak since the pandemic began.

    In the face of dismal economic data, China’s zero-covid policy is under severe strain.

    Tensions had been building in the city’s Haizhu District, which is under stay-at-home orders.

    The area is home to many poorer itinerant labourers. They have complained of not being paid if they are unable to turn up for work, and of food shortages and skyrocketing prices while living under Covid control measures.

    For several nights, they’d been tussling with the white-clad Covid prevention enforcement officials, and then overnight on Monday the anger suddenly exploded onto the streets of Guangzhou with a mass act of defiance.

    Again, unsubstantiated rumours have played a role. Stories have spread that the testing companies are faking PCR results to artificially boost the number of infections in order to make more money.

    In the north of the country, the coronavirus rumour mill is also building pressure.

    Officials in Hebei Province announced that the city of Shijiazhuang would halt mass testing. But this led to speculation that the population was going to be used, guinea-pig-style, to monitor what would happen if the virus was allowed to spread unchecked.

    Discussion of this has appeared on social media platforms under the hashtag #ShijiazhuangCovidprevention.

    Workers in PPE walk by a residential block under COVID-19 lockdown in Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong province on Thursday, November 10, 2022.
    IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES Image caption, Guangzhou has been under lockdown after a recent spurt in Covid cases

    Many panicking locals have stockpiled Chinese medicines which are said to help with Covid infection. Supplies in the city are said to have virtually run out for the moment.

    A similar viral rumour led to the mass breakout of workers at the Foxconn complex in the central city of Zhengzhou two weeks ago, which has hit the global supply of Apple iPhones.

    Local governments across China are struggling to maintain a zero-Covid approach without trashing their economies. The latest official factory output and retails sales figures show the crushing impact of the pandemic and the government’s policy response to it.

    There are no provinces at all which have reported zero cases in recent days.

    Around 20 million people in the heart of western China’s mega city of Chongqing have been placed under a type of lockdown being referred to ironically by people as “voluntary static management”. This is because, though there has been no official announcement, they’ve been told to remain indoors by community officials.

    Online there have been jokes that the Chongqing government didn’t want to announce a mass lockdown on the same day that measures easing zero-Covid rules across China were revealed.

    Because Covid amelioration still dominates life here, even a small shift in the way it is being administered can cause consternation and panic.

    At the beginning of this week, officials in Beijing’s Chaoyang district decided to close many of the street-side testing booths and move them into housing compounds. There was a sudden cut in the number of PCR stations. The problem is that many office buildings require a daily result, or you can’t enter.

    So at the booths that were open, the queues were enormous.

    From the workers stuck in Tibet who protested to leave Lhasa, to the lockdown of the entire region of Xinjiang, zero-Covid is not going smoothly.

    A series of changes announced last week slightly toning down the rules were seen as a sign that more easing was possible down the road. But even if the government is considering this, it may not be soon enough.