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Tourists are stranded, locals confined to their homes. The covid outbreaks and accompanying lockdowns are the disruption ahead of a key Chinese Communist Party assembly.
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by John Liu
In China’s western Xinjiang region, the government imposed a near-total lockdown and made a rare admission of failures in its handling of a covid outbreak. In northern Inner Mongolia, the government promised “total” efforts to curb the spread of the virus. And in a popular tourist destination in Yunnan, southern China, the government canceled flights, trapping crowds of tourists at an airport.
China is facing its biggest surge in covid cases in a month, complicating its arrangements for a very important Communist Party assembly in which Xi Jinping is expected to increase his authority and claim his rule in power. Provincial and local officials have vowed to prevent the spread. of the coronavirus “spread” to Beijing, the capital, where the assembly will be held.
The daily number of covid more than doubled last week, reaching around 1400 cases on Friday, in the country of another 1400 million people, a figure that remains minuscule by global standards. But the Chinese government is under enormous pressure to make sure nothing disrupts the party congress, which begins Oct. 16. They have responded by tightening restrictions that many are already excessive. They shut down regions and towns and impose mass testing and quarantines, disrupting the lives of millions and provoking public grievances.
The government is sticking to its “zero covid” policy to get rid of infections, despite the enormous economic and social burden of the strategy. Xi has made “zero covid” a political imperative, linking politics to the Communist Party. , while seeking to hail China’s good fortune in fighting infections as a sign of the superiority of Beijing’s authoritarian system.
China’s pandemic strategy is “almost a political crusade to show its loyalty to Xi Jinping himself,” said Willy Lam, an assistant professor of politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. in the graces of Xi Jinping. “
Covid infections have risen in part because of the country’s week-long National Day holiday, which began on Oct. 1. were cancelled.
The closures have been painful for others in less developed regions. Food and medicine shortages are not unusual in those areas, prompting citizens to complain and search social media.
The fast-spreading Omicron variant has consistently escaped China’s strict restrictions. Xinjiang officials have been forced to admit that deficiencies in their state have led to cases spreading from the region to other provinces and major cities, Beijing added.
Liu Sushe, vice president of the Xinjiang region, said this week that the region of another 22 million people is facing the most complicated public health emergency in its history. He said some officials had been negligent in their work and failed to properly implement measures to cancel infections. Liu said the measures, such as mandatory mass testing, would possibly even have contributed to the spread of the virus, as some fitness staff members who were not dressed in proper coverage became inflamed.
On Tuesday, Xinjiang banned the departure of citizens and visitors, preventing all trains and buses from leaving the domain and preventing the maximum number of flights. media platforms to request food and other supplies, add sanitary pads and medicines, a long confinement. Shortages of basic necessities, as well as the chaotic implementation of attempts to curb the epidemic, had already forced local officials to admit their shortcomings.
Similar in other regions, adding Shanghai earlier this year and Tibet a few weeks ago, have drawn anger over the human and economic cost of the harsh measures.
In the southwestern province of Yunnan, travelers took to Chinese social media site Weibo to express anger at being stranded at Xishuangbanna airport after flights were canceled at short notice.
Some videos shared online showed what gave the impression of guards or police dressed in white hazmat suits carrying firearms and insurrection shields at the airport. The guns sparked clashes, prompting exasperated tourists to scream: The New York Times could not independently determine the videos, which were most frequently censored on Chinese social media but continued to circulate widely on Twitter. Several calls to the airport went unanswered Friday.
On Weibo, commentators who said they were indoors in Yunnan complained that they didn’t know when they would leave. Many wrote that they were afraid to buy basic necessities, as most supermarkets were closed. Some stranded travelers have formed self-help teams to exchange information.
In Inner Mongolia, Covid cases rose to nearly 700 on Friday, the number among Chinese provinces, from a handful just a week ago.
At an assembly chaired by Sun Shaocheng, the Most Sensible Party official in Inner Mongolia, officials were told to eliminate the most sensitive infections by “killing chickens with a knife to slaughter cows,” a play about a Chinese language, to imply that one wishes to dominate. Act faster, prevent spread and contagion, especially in Beijing,” an official reading said. Since then, several cities and counties in the region have been put under lock and key.
Domination is increasingly the norm. In the tropical island province of Hainan, nicknamed the Hawaii of China, the government has ordered mass testing after only two cases were detected on Monday. The province recently emerged from a lockdown in August of the popular tourist city of Sanya, which trapped tens of thousands of travellers.
Public anger over lockdowns has sometimes reached levels, rising last month after a bus carrying others into quarantine crashed, killing another 27 people in the southern city of Guiyang. and disruption than the virus itself.
Officials have struggled to fund and staff efforts to prevent the virus. In many poorer regions, local government finances have become strained, especially as they have tried to impose mass testing on millions of others every few days.
“It’s just that some localities have been so sold out,” said Dali Yang, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. “One of the most demanding situations is that all those other people have been on the front lines for so long, incentives are starting to dwindle in some localities, some local governments are short of money. “
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