Chinese authorities have started investigating people who gathered at COVID-19 restriction protests over the weekend. According to a Reuters report, two protesters said that they had received phone calls from people who identified themselves as Beijing Police. They had been asked to report to a police station on Tuesday with written accounts of their activities on Sunday night.


One student said he was asked by his college if he had been to an area where a protest was taking place and to provide a written report on his whereabouts.


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"We are all desperately deleting our chat history from our apps," said another person who was at a Beijing demonstration and refused to be identified. According to him, the police asked how they heard about the protest and why they went there.


It is still unclear how the police are identifying the people to question and how many such people are there on the police’s radar.


Beijing's Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for China's foreign ministry said rights and freedoms must be exercised within the framework of the law.


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Underlying dissatisfaction with the harsh COVID prevention guidelines even after years into the pandemic has led to protests over the weekend in locations thousands of miles apart. A fire in which 10 people, including children, died, intensified the agitations. The victims of the deadly fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of China's northwestern Xinjiang region, could not escape as they had allegedly been locked inside their apartments by the Chinese authorities.


The lockdown is part of China’s harsh anti-COVID policy in the wake of the rise in the number of cases.


A Chinese official, Cheng Youquan, said, "The problems identified by the public do not centre on the epidemic prevention and control itself, but rather on streamlining prevention and control procedures. We will handle any pressing issues."


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The countrywide lockdowns have brought about one of the biggest economic slowdowns in China in decades. It has been fuelled by disruption in global supply chains and turbulent financial markets due to the lockdowns.


While some people are using messaging app Telegram to spread the word of protests, others are using dating apps to evade censorship and police scrutiny.


Meanwhile, police were deployed in large numbers in Shanghai and Beijing after some Telegram groups suggested congregating. "It's really scary," said 22-year-old Philip Qin from Beijing, referring to troops on the streets.


Police are even launching random checks to detect virtual private networks (VPN) on people’s mobile phones. VPNs are mostly illegal in China and the Telegram app is blocked for use on China's internet.


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