Sun Jian, a 37-year-old master's degree student in the Chinese city of Yantai, for months staged a solo campaign against his university's COVID-19 prevention measures, including blistering criticism on social media.
The last straw for authorities came on March 27, when Sun walked around his campus carrying a placard that read "lift the lockdown on Ludong".
But the support seems to be wearing thin as the highly contagious Omicron variant emerges in China, triggering curbs that have brought food shortages, family separations, lost wages and economic pain. Space for dissent has narrowed as China has grown more authoritarian under President Xi Jinping, and the anger over COVID restrictions has created headaches for authorities who have urged the public to make sacrifices for the greater good.
"The trouble brought by the virus can't be compared with the disruption from some of the anti-COVID measures taken by our school," Sun told Reuters by telephone.Arrests and detentions for COVID-related rule-breaking surged in March, according to the results of a search on the Weibo social media platform for police statements, posts by state agencies and state media reports from around China.
Public security departments also announced a surge in crackdowns on COVID rule violations in March, with cities and counties publishing 80 notices on their Weibo accounts, compared with seven in January and 10 in February.
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