The country has been rocked over the weekend due to widespread protests against the Chinese government's zero-Covid restrictions, but data shows that anger has been building for months.
A deadly blaze in the western Xinjiang region spurred the most recent demonstrations, a tragedy protesters say was made worse by the restrictions. Data from Freedom House, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that tracks political freedom, shows that nearly two-thirds of China's 34 regions have had at least one zero-Covid demonstration this year.
In June protests flared up right after the financial hub of Shanghai completed a grueling two-month lockdown and in September and October.
China has a zero-Covid strategy that aims to isolate individual cases and cut off transmission chains through a combination of quarantine, contact tracing, mass testing and strict lockdowns. This strategy makes it an outlier among the major economies in the world. According to an Oxford University government response tracker, China s lockdowns have remained at early-pandemic levels, while the US and remaining Group of 7 nations have relaxed their measures.
The Chinese government says its tough Covid measures have saved lives, pointing out an official death toll of 5,233 as of Nov. 28, compared to more than 1 million in the United States. China's population-adjusted death rate is much lower than those of the G-7 nations.
The Chinese economy, the world's second largest economy after the United States, is affected by the lockdowns. Retail sales fell sharply in April and May after the Shanghai lockdown, and declined again in October, according to data from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics.