Man the protests were kinda pathetic. Not gonna lie, I expected something bigger and better after I saw that they were clearly organized (very obvious from the fact they appeared in multiple cities / universities simultaneously and from the telegram leak)
They totally misjudged the situation, thinking that popular internet opinions represented mainstream opinions, not realizing the discontent people are the loudest and Chinese social media have a lot of 1450 wanwanese pretending to be Chinese. In a certain way they fooled themselves into thinking that Chinese public opinion has reached a boiling point against Chinese government and its policies.
Also instead of getting some legitimate covid lockdown grievances across, they decided to immediately make their protests political, with messages like “down with CCP” or “Freedom”, that people don’t relate to.
Anyways, China is relaxing its covid policies in response to some legitimate grievances of the population. Some places don’t require people who plan to only stay at home to test for covid anymore. I think more and more places are going to implement such policies in the future and China is going to return to normal gradually.