This is the Guardian.

Today, rare protests in China call for the end of COVID restrictions.

And in some places, the end of Xi Jinping.

What you're hearing right now is rare. And from the perspective of China's leaders, incredibly dangerous.

It's the sound of students at Beijing's Tsinghua University, calling for a free media and less censorship.

In other places, they're calling for the resignation of China's president Xi Jinping.

Many also holding up blank sheets of paper in a symbolic protest against state censorship.

What started as demonstrations in some cities against China's ongoing attempts to completely stamp out COVID.

Have over the past week become a national show of defiance.

In Xinjiang's capital, Arumchi, they're protesting against a fire in a lockdown apartment that killed at least 10 people, including children.

At the Fox Con Factory, the world's biggest manufacturer of iPhones in Jiangzhou, workers have risen up in frustration over strict COVID quarantine rules and claims of unpaid wages.

China's giant censorship machine is an overdrive determined to make it as if those protests never happened.

China has regular protests, but never like this.

With a Xinjiang Tibet, outskirts of Beijing, Shanghai, today, amazing scenes of people.

Nationwide, spreading from city to city, and in some places, calling for change at the very top.

And yes, the spark of it was about COVID lockdowns, but it's everything.

It's the greatest show of civil disobedience in China since Tiananmen Square and its left Chinese leaders in a trap.

From the Guardian, a Michael Safi. Today, in focus, how far could China's COVID-zero protests go?

Tania Branigan, your guardian writer and a former China correspondent.

I'd like you to start by describing for me what daily life is like for someone, living in a big Chinese city like Shanghai in terms of COVID restrictions.

Well, in fact, one of the striking things is how variable it is. So there's clearly a large number of people who feel that the COVID restrictions are completely out of control, are impinging on their daily life, upon their ability to earn a living on all their sort of fundamental freedoms.

And then there's a huge number of people, especially outside the big cities, who've just been able to sort of carry on completely unhindered.

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