Could China's Xi Jinping's strict covid lockdown cause political coup?

THE The rare street protests that erupted in multiple cities across China over the weekend was a clear referendum against President Xi Jinping’s harsh zero-COVID policy and the biggest public pushback in his political career, political watchers say.

While there had been small, localised anti-government protests in the past, those that erupted over the weekend were significantly larger and on a national-scale, said Bates Gill, a China expert with Asia Society .

Not since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident had so many people across China risk arrest and other repercussions to take to the streets to protest over a single issue.

“Its that national character – the widespread nature of it that makes it much more potentially volatile, and potentially more threatening set of problems that the party in China needs to deal with,” Gill told Reuters on Tuesday (November 29).