Police From China's Hubei, Jiangxi Clash Over Lockdown-Lift Disagreements - Authorities

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 28th March, 2020) Police officers from the Chinese province of Hubei, which became the first epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic, and the neighboring province of Jiangxi engaged in a brawl on a bridge between the two provinces due to disagreement over the end of lockdown regime in Hubei, the government of Hubei's Huangguang City said on Friday.

"This morning, police officers from Huangmei County in Hubei province and officers from Jiujiang City in Jiangxi province engaged in a dispute at the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge. Some officers were shoved to the ground. Just now, Ma Yanzhou, the party secretary of Huangmei County arrived at the scene and said: it's very dangerous to gather on the bridge, and urged onlookers to go home," the government said on its official Weibo account.

The provincial government is communicating with the Jiujiang side, and once the dispute will be resolved, announcements will follow, it said.

According to a leaked statement from the police department in Huangmei County in Hubei, the dispute resulted from Jiujiang police's attempt to "enforce health code standards of Jiangxi province" in the section of the Yangtze River Bridge under the jurisdiction of Huangmei county.

The system of health tracking codes, recently introduced by Chinese authorities, allows people from COVID-19 epicenters, like the central Hubei province, leave the areas and gradually return to work in other regions as the number of new infections in the country is declining. Each province issued its own health codes before a national health code was introduced.

As Hubei tried to lift its lockdown in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the neighboring Jiangxi refused to recognize the health codes and continued to request all the people from Hubei to get Jiangxi's health codes if they wanted to enter.