The government of China has swooped on a raft of new COVID hotspots and is locking down whole cities once more, pushing out both the recovery of China’s own tourism industry and the recovery of that country as a tourism market for Africa.
Last Monday, 427 new symptomatic cases were reported in more than 20 of the country’s provinces.
Controls on people’s movements are being tightened in an effort to contain the spread. CNBC has reported that three downtown districts in Shanghai have already ordered entertainment venues to close temporarily. Some schools in the central Chinese city of Xi’an have cancelled in-person classes.
People were blocked from returning to Beijing after the week-long holiday week (Golden Week), prompting speculation that this was an effort to try to delay the spread of COVID into the city which is hosting the Chinese Communist Party’s congress over the weekend of October 15.
A hashtag about the sudden closures was one of the top-trending items on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform.
CNBC said the measures had followed Golden Week, ending Friday October 7, during which China’s Covid situation appeared to deteriorate.
An October 4 lockdown in Xinjiang, a popular tourist city in southern Yunnan province, has prevented people from leaving the city. Another lockdown in the city of Haikou, in Hainan province, started on October 6. The Guardian reported that other Chinese cities had increased testing, closed tourism sites and halted public transport. Shenzhen, which reported 33 cases on October 12, ordered daily testing for all arrivals for three days. In Beijing, the shuttle buses bringing tens of thousands of workers in from Tianjin and Hebei were suspended. In Zhengzhou city, Henan, where 12 cases were reported, all residents wishing to use public transport or to enter public spaces must get tested every 24 hours. In Guangzhou, where 10 cases were reported, authorities launched a mass testing drive and partial lockdown of at least one district.
China’s central government has reaffirmed its ‘dynamic zero’ COVID policy through an article in the Communist Party’s newspaper, People’s Daily. But the state’s ‘dynamic zero’ strategy of containing and eliminating every outbreak is now starting to evince protests from citizens as threats of more sudden lockdowns and travel restrictions loom.
Open protests are rare in China, but photos and videos have shown citizens protesting by hanging banners from bridges.
