“The CCP has abused China’s people long enough. Covid has been an evil tool of oppression. It started in Wuhan, it ends in Wuhan. I’m praying for these people,” she wrote on Twitter, sharing a video of protests in the city, the capital of the Hubei province.
Wuhan is one of the major Chinese cities—including Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai—to have been affected by protests over the weekend. Public anger is growing over the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) harsh COVID policies.
Since 2020, the party has stuck firmly to its “zero COVID” strategy, despite its devastating economic impact. In the past two years, entire cities and businesses in China have been brought to a standstill over the emergence of any number of infections, disrupting the lives of millions of people.
The weekend’s protests were triggered by a fire at an apartment building in the western city of Urumqi, Xinjiang, last week, in which at least 10 people died. Speculation online that rescuers weren’t able to save the apartment’s residents because the city was under lockdown sparked outrage among the public, leading many to take to the streets.
Such large-scale shows of civil disobedience and dissent are rare in China, but the protests over the weekend have shown that frustrations over the CCP’s COVID policies have reached boiling point in the country.
While many protested peacefully, holding candlelit vigils for the victims of the apartment building fire, in cities like Wuhan and Shanghai protesters clashed with riot police. An unknown number of protesters were reportedly detained in Shanghai, including BBC cameraman Edward Lawrence, who said he was assaulted while in detention.
The rest of the world is closely watching the protests in China because it’s unusual for the regime to be publicly challenged.
But for Greene, a known far-right conspiracy theorist who has repeatedly undermined vaccination efforts in the U.S. and spread COVID misinformation online, the protests in Wuhan—and the rest of China—are more about the negative impact of COVID restrictions in general.
The Georgia representative, who last year compared mask mandates to the Holocaust and later apologized for it, was temporarily banned from Twitter in January for repeated violations of its rules around COVID misinformation (including falsely reporting “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths” in the U.S.).
Greene responded to the ban with a statement on Telegram saying that “social media platforms can’t stop the truth from being spread far and wide,” and accusing Twitter of trying to complete “a Communist revolution.”
