Over the weekend, mainland China experienced something it hasn't seen in more than 30 years: Thousands of protesters flooding the streets, defying the Communist Party.
The protests had an immediate impact on global markets, and raised questions about the path forward for China's increasingly sluggish economy.
What's going on?
The protests began Friday after 10 people were killed in a fire in China's Xinjiang province, where Covid lockdown restrictions reportedly hindered first responders from reaching the blaze.
The fire catalyzed three years' worth of frustration over the country's zero-Covid policy, which has seen millions of people locked down for weeks on end at various times.
The quarantines and testing protocols have taken psychological and economic tolls. Growth has slumped and unemployment is rising. Under lockdown, many residents complained of inhumane conditions, facing shortages of food and medicine. One human rights group reported at least five suicides in Lhasa, Tibet, where some residents have lived under a lockdown for more than 100 days.
People are at their breaking point, and their anger is directly targeting President Xi Jining and the Party leadership. During the first night of the demonstrations in Shanghai, a crowd shouted "Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!"
Meanwhile, the prospect of social upheaval in the world's second-biggest economy has sent a chill through global markets.
On Monday, the Dow fell more than 500 points, following European and Asian indexes down. Oil prices dropped sharply as investors feared that surging Covid cases and protests in China would sap demand from one of the world's largest oil consumers. US oil hit its lowest price in nearly a year, falling 2.7% to $74 a barrel.
BIG PICTURE
Officials in Beijing are in quite a pickle here.
To fix its economy, China needs to ease lockdowns to allow its people to get back to their lives. But doing so — in a country that has almost no natural immunity to the virus and has shunned the idea of importing Western-made boosters — could lead to a deadly outbreak.
Xi, who just began an a third term and has doubled down on zero-Covid, doesn't want to risk a public health disaster that would undermine his credibility. And certainly, cracking down on peaceful protesters and continuing the heavy-handed policy is an option — one that China has a long history of deploying. But all of Xi's options are less than ideal for a leader who's long been preoccupied with stability.
Related: Twitter searches for the protests in China returned a flood of spam, pornography and gibberish that researchers said may be a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government or its allies to drown out images of the demonstrations.
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