Workers and residents rebelling against a pandemic lockdown in an industrial district of southern China clashed with riot police in white hazmat suits twice this week, the latest flare-up of anger against “zero Covid” restrictions that have spawned protests across the country.

The Communist Party under Xi Jinping has been confronting China’s widest and boldest surge of protest in decades, as large numbers gathered over the weekend to denounce Xi’s stringent, exhausting and increasingly difficult efforts to eliminate Covid cases.

Although security forces reasserted control over neighbourhoods and university campuses this week, the tumult on Monday and Tuesday nights on the edge of Guangzhou suggested that poor, frustrated communities of migrant workers may keep pushing back against the “zero Covid” measures, especially the weekslong shutdowns of neighbourhoods. Crowds of hundreds in the city’s Houjiao neighbourhood clashed with the police, following days of angry confrontations there.

Some threw glass bottles at lines of anti-riot officers. Some tore down barriers meant to lock in the crowded warrens of shops and cheap apartments. They pushed over a makeshift hut used for Covid tests, while hundreds of onlookers roared in approval. Members of the crowd also overturned a small van.

Video showed hundreds of police officers pouring into the area, shouting and banging their clubs on their riot shields and subduing residents.

Several men, apparently handcuffed, were led away by the officers, another video showed.

“The working people mostly feel that the lockdown has gone on too long; it’s been over a month,” said a resident of the neighbourhood who joined the nighttime protest.