Beijing: The Chinese police are accused of attacking and detaining journalists, including BBC reporters, who came to cover the widespread demonstrations in the Shanghai region of China calling for an end to the three-year Covid restrictions.

After a remarkable weekend of nationwide protests against restrictive coronavirus curbs, China reported another record-high number of COVID-19 infections on Monday. These circumstances have not occurred since President Xi Jinping took office ten years ago.

On Monday, the rare protests raised concerns about the administration of China's zero-COVID policy and its effects on the second-largest economy in the world. Chinese censors hurriedly removed relevant images and posts. Stocks and oil prices also fell sharply.

While students gathered on campuses throughout China in protests sparked by outrage over an apartment fire late last week in the far western city of Urumqi that killed 10, protesters overturned COVID testing facilities in Wuhan and Lanzhou over the weekend.

The deadly fire fuelled speculation that COVID curbs in the city, parts of which had been under lockdown for 100 days, had hindered rescue and escape, which city officials denied. Crowds in Urumqi took to the streets on Friday evening, chanting "End the lockdown!", according to unverified videos on social media.

In Beijing, large crowds gathered past midnight on Sunday along the capital's 3rd Ring Road during peaceful but often impassioned scenes.

In the early hours of Monday, one group chanted “We don’t want COVID tests, we want freedom” while brandishing blank white pieces of paper, which have become a symbol of protest in China in recent days.

Cars that passed by regularly joined in the fanfare by honking their horns and giving thumbs up to protesters, which in turn generated massive cheers from those gathered.

The protesters were trailed by dozens of uniformed police officers, with plain-clothes security personnel in among the crowd and police cars moving along nearby.

An official who said he was the head of Beijing's police department came personally to speak to several of the protesters, holding a loudspeaker to plead with them to go home.

"You young people. You need to go home now. You’re affecting traffic here by standing on the road," he said.

Shanghai's clashes on Sunday followed a vigil the day before held by some of the city's residents for the victims of the Urumqi apartment fire, which turned into a protest against COVID curbs, with the crowd chanting calls for lockdowns to be lifted.

"Down with the Chinese Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping", one large group chanted in the early hours of Sunday, according to witnesses and videos posted on social media, in a rare public protest against the country's leadership.

China has stuck with Xi's zero-COVID policy even as much of the world has lifted most restrictions.

China earlier this month sought to make the curbs more targeted and less onerous, prompting speculation that it will soon begin moving towards full reopening, but a resurgence in some cases has thwarted investor hopes for significant easing anytime soon.

Many analysts say China is unlikely to begin significant reopening before March or April at the earliest, and experts warn that China needs to ramp up its vaccination efforts as well.

China on Monday reported a fifth straight daily record of new local cases of 40,052, up from 39,506 a day earlier. Mega-cities Guangzhou and Chongqing, with thousands of cases, are struggling to contain outbreaks, while hundreds of infections were recorded in several cities across the country on Sunday.