There’s a reason you don’t see civil disobedience happening in China very often. Anyone who participates in it is risking their future and their freedom because the CCP has no hesitation about locking up troublemakers for years on even the flimsiest of charges. But that threat didn’t stop about 1,000 angry customers from showing up outside a branch of China’s largest bank Sunday. The protesters are angry because they haven’t been able to retrieve money they deposited in several rural banks for months. Yesterday they chanted “return my savings!” while using techniques designed to indicate they were not challenging the supremacy of the CCP. It didn’t work for long.

“Henan banks, return my savings!” they shouted in unison, many waving Chinese flags, in videos shared with CNN by two protesters.

Using national flags to display patriotism is a common strategy for protesters in China, where dissent is strictly suppressed. The tactic is meant to show that their grievances are only against local governments, and that they support and rely on the central government to seek redress.

“Against the corruption and violence of the Henan government,” a banner written in English read.

A large portrait of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong was pasted on a pillar at the entrance of the bank.

Across the street, hundreds of police and security personnel — some in uniforms and others in plain clothes — assembled and surrounded the site, as protesters shouted “gangsters” at them.

Posting a portrait of Mao on the entrance to a bank seems somewhat counterintuitive to me. In fact, the protesters were treated exactly as Mao would have treated them.

…the authorities sent in guards en masse to break up the demonstration. They beat the protesters, kicking them to the ground and shoving them onto buses — the harshest response yet to the bank depositors’ efforts to seek redress.

Photos and video of plainclothes security agents attacking the protesters were shared on Chinese social media, stirring anger over the use of force. While protest images are often quickly censored in China, the footage from Zhengzhou was still widely available on Monday, with one hashtag viewed 32 million times on Weibo, the Twitter-like service…

“We came all the way to Zhengzhou to get our money back, and we didn’t want to have conflicts with anyone,” said Feng Tianyu, 31, who lives in the northern city of Harbin. “But the government sent so many people to deal with the unarmed people. We were cheated financially, beaten physically and traumatized mentally.”

Ms. Feng, who is two months pregnant, said men dressed in white shirts pulled her by her hair and arms onto a bus, where police officers beat some of the demonstrators. She said she was eventually taken to a hospital for stomach pains, but was refused admission.

Here’s what the protest looked like.

51/n pic.twitter.com/RchHp4n6xI

— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) July 10, 2022

And soon after the police arrived in white and blue shirts.

Cops are already standing guard as more of them move in. This video was taken from the other side with the depositors in the background.

黑社会！黑社会！…

53/n pic.twitter.com/HM1JHqCwKo

— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) July 10, 2022

The protesters just kept chanting but weren’t doing anything. Eventually the police raid began by charging into the crowd at a run. Protesters started throwing water bottles at them.

72/n pic.twitter.com/nC6tMqT9wc

— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) July 10, 2022

Police were dragging people down the steps and kicking them.

68/n pic.twitter.com/OOSwFNVQsH

— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) July 10, 2022

Many people were injured.

🔻 this depositor was punched or kicked in the eye… He’s being taken away but I have no idea what vehicle this is or where he’s going.

70/n pic.twitter.com/A4OVWbvzXT

— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) July 10, 2022

Everyone is being dragged off to jail.

75/n pic.twitter.com/sTE7FaPnTO

— Byron Wan (@Byron_Wan) July 10, 2022

Protests like this have been taking place on a smaller scale since April when the banks first announced cash withdrawals would not be allowed.

The 45-year-old entrepreneur asked us to call him Peter for security reasons. He’s from the eastern city of Wenzhou and is just one of thousands of depositors who have been fighting to recover their savings from at least six banks in rural provinces in central China.

“I’m close to having a nervous breakdown. I can’t sleep,” Peter told CNN Business.

When he tried to access his accounts online, a statement would pop up on the homepage informing him that the website was under maintenance and services would be unavailable for a while, Peter told CNN Business. Two months later, those services have not been restored…

“I’m quite worried about how they [authorities] are going to deal with our money,” said Ye, who asked CNN Business to only use his surname. Ye is a 30-year old tech worker from the city of Dongguan in Guangdong province — about 1500 km (900 miles) from the banks he used in Henan. He said he has a total of 160,000 yuan (about $24,000) worth of deposits with them.

“We were told by the banks that the deposit products were legal, and that they were protected by the deposit insurance scheme,” he said. “We just want to get our money back.”

The government claims the problem was caused by a shareholder in each of the four affected banks and police are supposedly investigating what happened to the missing money. But that investigation could take years to be resolved. Meanwhile, people have no access to their money and the government is using every trick in the book to prevent them from protesting to call attention to that fact. Last month they even used some of the COVID social control they’ve put in place over the past two years to try to stop protesters from gathering. This story was published by the NY Times on June 16:

Dozens of people from across China had set off for the city of Zhengzhou days ago to protest the freezing of their savings amid an investigation into several regional banks. But when they arrived in the city, many found that the so-called health codes on their phones had turned from green — meaning good — to red, a designation that would prevent them from moving freely.

Tom Zhang, the owner of a textile business in the eastern province of Zhejiang, said this happened to him when he was on a train headed to Zhengzhou on Sunday, despite coming from a town where there had been no Covid cases. Upon arriving in the city, Mr. Zhang said, he was stopped by the police and told that his red code — usually suggesting an infection or close contact — indicated he posed public health risk. He said the Zhengzhou police had held him in a local library for around 12 hours.

“The red code was definitely used to limit us depositors,” Mr. Zhang said in a phone interview. “It was a complete absurdity.”

Who could have guessed that a police state would abuse it’s health-related powers to control people’s movements? It’s the least surprising thing China has done this year.