Watch: The reason students in China are crawling around in circles on campus

After three years of restrictive Covid-19 lockdowns and online learning, students in China will be forgiven for feeling as though they are going in circles.

And to signal their frustration with Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy, they are getting down on their hands and knees and doing just that.

In a country where criticising the government is laden with danger, young people are engaging in a gentler form of demonstration which has been dubbed “collective crawling”.

Footage of students forming a circle and crawling around has flooded social media. It is a way for them to express ennui, boredom and fatigue with unending pandemic restrictions. 

“The crawling movement started because many students are greatly impacted by the flare-ups of Covid,” Harrison Peng, a second-year university student in Chongqing, told The Telegraph. “We are not allowed to go outside, and with the pressure of studying, many students can’t find a better way to relieve the stress.”

Lin Shihou, another student at Chongqing University, described it as a “collective ritual for young people to release the feelings of being repressed”. 

It is “using meaninglessness to resist meaninglessness”, he said.

In a bizarre parallel, a video of hundreds of sheep walking in a circle for 12 days in Mongolia went viral last week. However, the flock were thought to be suffering from listeriosis, not lockdown fatigue. 

Covid restrictions have ravaged the Chinese economy and the job prospects of young people who are required to take almost daily PCR tests. 

On Monday, Beijing health authorities announced a mandatory three-day isolation for people entering the city and urged residents to work from home and reduce social contact following one of the worst outbreaks of infection since the start of the pandemic. 
  
And earlier this year, university students started making pets out of recycled cardboard and walking them around campus as a statement on recurring lockdowns.

In recent months, authorities have been irritated by the “lie flat” (“tang ping”) trend which, like the “quiet quitting” phenomenon, sees workers refuse to do any more work than they are paid for.  

Last month, Chinese state television began promoting crawling as a fitness fad, broadcasting images of elderly men from a village in the eastern Jiangsu province doing a so-called “crocodile crawl”. But while state media lightheartedly advertised crawling as a vigorous form of exercise, the students are not engaging in it as a form of exercise.

Its spread to campuses can be traced back to an anonymous online post this month by a student at Communication University of China in Beijing, who said he wanted to walk on all fours across campus the following day.

While the videos of students crawling on sports fields at nighttime, sometimes rolling on the lawn, don’t appear to have been censored yet, school officials are already becoming wary of the trend. Several anonymous social media users said “crawling” groups had been asked to disband by university officials.

Mr Peng, who is a student coordinator for his class, said he is communicating students’ requests to university administrators, and they are trying to meet them.

“With the arbitrary lockdowns of universities … students would go insane if they didn’t find something to relieve the stress,” wrote one Weibo commenter. 

“It seems like everybody is not in a good state of mind,” wrote another.