Our colleague, Brian Speagle, lives in Beijing.

And Sunday night, he was at home checking social media.

In cities across China, protests against the country's strict COVID rules were breaking

out.

Crowds had gathered in Xinjiang in Shanghai, and Brian was looking to see whether there

would be protests in Beijing too.

But lo and behold, Sunday night at about 10, 30 pm, we start seeing these images flowing

in on Twitter and elsewhere, at that point, a relatively small gathering.

So I get on my bike right away and I go out to see what's going on.

Brian caught up with the crowd by the Liangmatchau River.

There were hundreds of protesters, and they were on the move.

They basically just start walking on the streets, completely unobstructed.

Traffic is closed down.

And they're chanting, we don't want PCR tests, we want freedom.

Eventually, Brian ended up at Beijing's third ring road.

I took the bike up onto an overpass, a walkway over the third ring road to kind of look

out over the scene of what was going on.

And I could see protesters kind of out in front of me on the ground, and they were kind of

surrounded by police.

But then the most remarkable thing that I saw was that all of the Beijingers who had come

out specifically in their cars driving in the southbound lanes of the third ring road,

honking their horns in support of the protesters.

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