Hundreds of pensioners have come to the streets of Wuhan and Dalian in China to protest medical benefit cuts, following rare rallies in November that resulted in the repeal of China’s contentious “zero-COVID” policy. In Wuhan’s center city, footage released online on Wednesday showed hundreds of people, mostly elderly, outside the city’s central Zhongshan Park. One video from Wuhan, a city of approximately 11 million people, confirmed by Reuters showed demonstrators and uniformed security personnel punching and shoving one other.
Hundreds of people flocked to the streets in the northeastern city of Dalian to protest the health insurance reforms, according to AFP, citing a local witness. “Give me back my medical insurance money,” people could be heard saying in one video, which AFP geolocated to the city’s Renmin Square, which is home to several local government buildings. Rallies are uncommon in China, although they do occur on occasion, as last year’s widespread protests against President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy, which had been in effect for three years. In Wuhan, where COVID-19 was discovered in late 2019, police stood in numerous rows, some locking arms, while hundreds of primarily elderly demonstrators spilled onto the main road, yelling complaints. In one video, the mob begins chanting “The Internationale,” the communist song that has been taught and performed in China since the Communist Party seized control at the end of the civil war in 1949. According to Wuhan citizens, older Chinese are enraged by revisions to the country’s public health insurance system, which have decreased pensioners’ monthly personal medical benefits from 260 yuan ($38) to 83 yuan ($12). Last week, there was also a protest in the city. “This money is quite small, but it is life-saving money for the elderly,” Wuhan resident Zhang Hai told Reporters. He did not attend the demonstration on Wednesday, but he said some of his friends went. “People are not rich, therefore every little amount of money is quite valuable,” he explained. The insurance reforms, progressively adopted since 2021, come as local government resources are stressed as a result of the years-long commitment to zero-COVID and the bankruptcy of some of the country’s major developers.
According to observers, the demonstrations in Wuhan have been worsened by the fact that officials have been mostly untouched by the changes. “Civil employees and public institution personnel are still eligible to subsidized medical assistance insurance on top of the employee health insurance program,” political risk consultancy SinoInsider stated in a note. “Senior and retired CCP (Chinese Communist Party) cadres have long enjoyed access to extensive medical treatments at public cost and without having to pay for basic healthcare insurance.”
