| Hi, Allen Wan here from Shanghai, where I have been covering the protests in China. This special edition of our newsletter will bring you up to speed on everything you need to know. It all started innocently enough. The weekend was in full swing and some soccer fans in the financial hub chose to celebrate their precious freedom by staying out late Saturday night to watch the World Cup. After a brutal two-month-long Covid lockdown earlier this year, Shanghai has had it relatively easy compared to the rest of the country. It's had far fewer cases than other major cities such as Guangzhou and Beijing, which are still enduring nonstop testing and movement restrictions.  Police ask people to leave an area in Shanghai. Photographer: HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP I decided to play it safe and watch from the comfort of my home. As I woke up near midnight, my mobile phone lit up like a Christmas tree. My friends were posting images of a vigil on Wulumuqi Road, a street lined with fancy shops and restaurants. Hundreds had gathered to commemorate the lives lost in a fire in Urumqi in northwest China, after claims residents couldn't escape or be rescued because of Covid controls.
Over the next few hours, videos emerged faster than censors could remove them. The crowds had grown larger and they were clashing with police. The protests had spread nationwide from Beijing, all the way to Wuhan and Xinjiang. One showed university students in Nanjing holding up blank white pieces of paper to demonstrate their lack of free speech. Others posted music videos like Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us to show their discontent.  Protesters hold up blank pieces of paper during a protest in Beijing. Photographer: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images AsiaPac It wasn't until the next day when I arrived at Wulumuqi Road that I fully understood the extent of people's rage. There were thousands along the road, being cordoned off and pushed back by police in a game of cat and mouse. In the middle of the street was a father who put his toddler daughter on his shoulders for a better view. Elsewhere were older men who would normally be seen fishing in the neighborhood ponds. But many were young and many were female. The so-called Lying Flat generation was anything but.
Watch: Covid Protests Spread Across China Things got more tense as the evening wore on. More people arrived, along with busloads of police. While it never descended into outright violence, there were definitely moments of tension. I saw two officers hold a man aloft by his head and feet as they took him away. I later learned that my friend Ed Lawrence, a BBC cameraman, had been arrested, handcuffed and beaten while covering the protests in what became a diplomatic incident between the UK and China. The US hasn't said a whole lot beyond the fact it is watching events closely, though one Biden administration official, speaking anonymously, admitted it wanted to use cautious language to avoid being seen as stoking the protests. Like many long-time China watchers, I had grown accustomed to the notion that the middle class here wouldn't dare take to the streets en masse to vent their frustrations. I have personally witnessed only a handful of protests in my almost 13 years as a foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News. There was one broad movement — in Shanghai's People's Square during the Jasmine Revolution of 2011 — that was quickly snuffed out. Another more narrowly focused — angry depositors in Shenzhen who wanted their money back from distressed property developer Evergrande — also faded from view. Will these protests end up the same? This weekend will be telling. Former President Jiang Zemin died this week, and crowds may gather to offer their condolences. At Shanghai's Jiaotong University, Jiang's alma mater, people who left bouquets at one location were told to move along.  Jiang Zemin. Photographer: Diana Walker/Getty Images The timing of his death has eerie similarity to that of Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer and former general secretary whose death triggered the student movement. But that's where the coincidences end. Jiang is no protest icon and the recent protests bear no more than a passing resemblance to what ultimately led to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Bloomberg Economist Tom Orlik sees the recent protests as something more akin to what the US and other countries went through as they transitioned to living with Covid. According to Orlik, "that was a messy process, with botched policies, heightened social stress, and a massive cost to public health."
Watch: Xi Jinping Faces Worst Crisis of his Tenure
Since last weekend's chaotic events, the cities have grown quiet, with a heavy police presence conspiring with a recent cold wave to dissuade any potential civil strife. In parts of downtown Shanghai, officers were spotted on virtually every corner. In Beijing, the university and residential district of Haidian was buzzing with police vehicles. The government is also hunting down those it thinks responsible, labeling them "hostile forces" and tasking police to check people's smartphones for apps banned in China like Twitter and YouTube. But even if the demonstrations fail to gather momentum, they may have already accomplished their goal. The government has in recent days struck a conciliatory tone toward residents unhappy with Covid curbs. It has vowed to speed up shots for the elderly, seen as a crucial step toward reopening. China's top official in charge of the fight said the omicron strain was "less pathogenic" in the first public acknowledgment the virus is no longer as severe. In another key shift, Beijing will allow some to isolate at home. Investors have been quick to seize on these signs of softening, sending Chinese stocks and the yuan surging, in the belief the government has laid out a clearer road map out of Covid Zero and a return to some sort of normality. At the end of the day, that may be what the protestors had hoped for all along.
Each weekday, The Big Take podcast brings you one story — one big, important story from Bloomberg's global newsroom. Subscribe and listen on iHeart, Apple and Spotify. "I think you can say that this is the most confrontational street event since Tiananmen." Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who helped edit the Tiananmen Papers, a collection of secret documents related to the 1989 crackdown. | 
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