Chinese migrant workers protest amid Covid-19 lockdowns in Guangzhou textile hub

Residents confirm unrest erupted on Monday night in urban villages in Haizhu district, home to the country’s biggest fabric market
Textile industry employees have been forced to return to their home provinces as coronavirus cases spike

Coronavirus China

Xinlu Liang

Published: 8:19pm, 15 Nov 2022

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Migrant workers in China’s southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou staged a rare protest at a textile compound on Monday night amid lockdowns and a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases.

Guangzhou, a city of 19 million people, reported 5,124 local infections for Monday, most of them in the city’s Haizhu district, which is home to China’s largest fabric market and a centre for textile production.

On Monday night, social media posts and videos showed hundreds of residents breaking through lockdown barriers, breaching checkpoints and marching on the streets of the city’s dense and unregulated urban villages. Some even got into fist fights with local health authorities and volunteers in protective gear.

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Covid lockdowns spark rare protest in southern Chinese city of Guangzhou

In some video clips, residents who appeared to be migrant workers complained of a lack of supplies and the skyrocketing price of daily necessities. The Post could not independently verify the authenticity of the videos and posts.

Marrisa, a resident living opposite an urban village, said she witnessed one of the incidents.

She said that around 8.45pm, one or two people were shouting in a dialect other than Cantonese. About 10 to 15 minutes later, “the whole area was overwhelmed with yells from upstairs to downstairs”, she said.

“After a while, people began to gather, violently beat the corrugated iron fences [that seal off the buildings] and smashed the checkpoint. Then many volunteers and police headed towards them.”

The chaos lasted about 20 minutes, and some residents who did not go downstairs chanted messages of support from windows, said Marrisa, who declined to give her surname. By about 9.40pm, the situation was under control and police had arrived, she said.

A mass testing site worker who was at the scene said he saw police detain four people, one of whom had tested positive for Covid-19.

Multiple residents confirmed to the Post that unrest erupted in several urban villages in Haizhu district, including Kangle, Lujiang, Datang and Xiachong.

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A police officer in Guangzhou confirmed that the unrest occurred and said the reasons behind it were multifaceted.

“Everyone has his or her own demands, but definitely there are people provoking troubles deliberately,” he said.

After the unrest, the residents were sent back to quarantine, and police and community workers put the barriers back in place, the officer said.

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The reason for the sudden protest was not immediately clear. One community volunteer, a native of Hubei province, said it was related to migrant workers failing to comply with local pandemic control measures.

The fabric market employs hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, with more than 300,000 from Hubei, according to the Apparel and Fashion Industry Association of the Hubei Chamber of Commerce in Guangdong.

Last weekend, workers were forced to return to their home provinces, instead of going back to the urban villages, as part of Guangzhou’s pandemic prevention and control measures.

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The industry association had been negotiating between Haizhu health authorities and Hubei workers under lockdown, an employee with the group said on Tuesday morning.

“We’ve been busy managing the situation on the ground,” she said, adding they have been collecting the workers’ information, sending it for review, buying bus or train tickets and escorting them back home.

Some speculated that the plan to send workers to their hometowns was one of the reasons behind the unrest on Monday evening.

Others blamed long-standing conflicts between Hubei workers and Guangzhou locals in urban villages.