The tragedy came as frustrations with zero-Covid policies were already starting to spike. Violent confrontations had broken out between workers and security at a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou that manufactures iPhones. Scott Kennedy, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, DC, says that when he visited Beijing and Shanghai in September and October, it was clear that people had “grown weary” of measures like regular PCR testing, scanning QR “health codes” to go anywhere, and the constant specter of a fresh lockdown. “I’m not surprised that things have boiled over,” Kennedy says. The government in early November
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