Four banks in the Henan province froze deposits worth up to $1.5 billion in mid-April amid China’s recent economic downturn, leaving thousands of citizens in the Henan and neighboring Anhui province without access to their bank accounts.
Crowds of Chinese bank customers demonstrated outside a bank on Sunday over bank accounts that were frozen for months in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, according to the Associated Press.
Several hundred protesters shouting slogans gathered in the early morning at the entrance to a branch of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) in Zhengzhou, a Chinese city located 380 miles southwest of Beijing, reported the AP. The protesters are among thousands of depositors who found that they could not withdraw their money from the accounts for months due to an upgrade of the bank’s internal systems, Reuters reported.
Police, who closed off the area after they arrived, told protesters that they were illegally assembled and would be detained if they refused to disperse, the AP reported. A banking regulator and a local government official also arrived to address the crowd, but the protesters shouted them down.
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