Hundreds of people in China have taken to the streets of Lhasa, Tibet’s regional capital, to protest against COVID-19 restrictions, a rare demonstration in this highly-policed region.
For almost three months, Lhasa (west) has been put under a bell, due to the so-called “zero COVID” policy which forces millions of inhabitants in China into confinement as soon as a handful of positive cases are discovered.
Three years after the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan (center), part of the population in China is now exasperated by these restrictions.
Videos shared on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, show hundreds of people marching through the streets of Lhasa on Wednesday.
Among the protesters are migrant workers demanding permission to leave Tibet to return to their respective provinces.
These images, the location of which AFP was able to independently verify, have since been deleted from the Chinese Internet.
In one of the videos, hundreds of people are on a street, blocked by police and health workers in full suits.
“Go home and don’t clutter the area,” an official shouts into a megaphone.
Other footage, shot from a different angle, shows police vans and officers with riot shields nearby.
These videos were shot next to a market near the Potala, the palace of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who has lived in exile in India since 1959.
“I want to go home,” chants a woman in one of the videos.
Other footage shows a nighttime standoff between a mob and police in what appears to be a residential area of Lhasa.
“People have been locked up for too long, the psychological pressure is too strong to bear” moreover for people “without any income”, indignantly a man in Mandarin.
China recorded more than 1,000 new positive cases of COVID-19 on its territory on Friday.
Forced by the civil war to let Tibet function in an autonomous framework between 1912 and 1950, Beijing regained effective control of this territory in 1951. But many Tibetans complain of restrictions on freedom of worship and economic discrimination.
This region was notably shaken in 2008 by inter-ethnic violence.
The authorities have since drastically reinforced security there.