Tag: Beijing (China)

As Covid Spreads Fast in China, Beijing Isn’t in Lockdown. But It Feels Like It.

Chin@Strategy

Restaurants have closed because too many staff members have tested positive for Covid. The usually ubiquitous food delivery workers zipping through traffic on their scooters have nearly vanished because of infections. Pharmacies have been emptied of cold medicine, and supermarkets have been running low on the essentials: disinfectant solution, antibacterial wipes, beer. Less than a week after the Chinese government lifted its stringent “zero Covid” restrictions, Beijing looks like a city in the throes of a lockdown — this time, self-imposed by residents. Sidewalks and pedestrian shopping streets are barren,…

China’s Looming ‘Tsunami’ of Covid Cases Will Test Its Hospitals

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Until recently, China, the world’s most populous nation, was also the world’s last Covid holdout. But in a matter of weeks it will be hit by a wave that a top health official predicts could infect many hundreds of millions of people. This week, Beijing took its biggest step toward living with Covid, all but abandoning an unpopular and costly “zero Covid” policy of lockdowns and mass quarantines it had hoped would eliminate infections. The abrupt pivot has raised the specter of tremendous strain on a health care system that…

Beijing Braces for Covid Surge After China Lifts Pandemic Curbs

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At a hospital in the affluent Beijing district of Chaoyang, several dozen people lined up outdoors in near freezing weather on Friday at a clinic designated for fever patients. Some residents flocked to pharmacies, buying up stocks of at-home antigen Covid test kits. Many chose to stay home, leaving the capital’s usually busy streets quiet except for the puttering of motorbikes driven by food delivery workers. Beijing is bracing for what could be a surge in Covid cases, as extensive controls that had kept the virus at bay for nearly…

China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Policy, in Pictures

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For a long time during the coronavirus pandemic, China’s aggressive approach to stamping out cases worked. It has kept deaths from Covid-19 much lower than the rest of the world, most notably in comparison with the United States. But in recent months, that approach, called “zero Covid,” seemed increasingly outdated. China’s residents were still subject to snap lockdowns, mass testing and harsh quarantines while the rest of the world adapted to living with the virus. Frustrated citizens demonstrated on the streets in late November, some even calling for the Communist…

After Fanning Covid Fears, China Must Now Try to Allay Them

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For nearly three years, the Chinese government deployed its considerable propaganda apparatus to fan fears about Covid to justify large-scale quarantines, frequent mass testing and the tracking of more than a billion people. As the authorities now shift their approach to the pandemic, they face the task of downplaying those fears. Until the past week, during which there were rallies voicing extraordinary public opposition to the stringent “zero Covid” rules, government officials and state media were still emphasizing the most ominous medical news about the pandemic. There were countless stories…

How China’s Police Used Phones and Faces to Track Protesters

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On Sunday, when Mr. Zhang went to protest China’s strict Covid policies in Beijing, he thought he came prepared to go undetected. He wore a balaclava and goggles to cover his face. When it seemed that plainclothes police officers were following him, he ducked into the bushes and changed into a new jacket. He lost his tail. That night, when Mr. Zhang, who is in his 20s, returned home without being arrested, he thought he was in the clear. But the police called the next day. They knew he had…

What China’s Covid Protesters Are Calling For

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As he crossed a small road in Shanghai, the man held up a bundle of flowers and issued a rallying call to a crowd of excited onlookers. Within minutes, he was surrounded by security officials and wrestled into a police car. It was one of the more dramatic moments in several days of protests in China that captured the boldness of young Chinese demonstrators as well as the risks they face in challenging the country’s authoritarian leadership. The protests have been fueled by anger over an apartment building fire in…

At a China Covid Protest, a Mix of Giddy Elation and Anxiety

Chin@Strategy

BEIJING — The crowd was hard to make out at first, a dark mass huddled along the Beijing riverbank after sunset. They stood quietly, almost nervously, dozens of people bundled in thick coats beside yellowed willow trees. At their center was a small altar, strewn with candles and flowers, for the 10 people who died in a fire in western China last week. Two hours later, that crowd had swelled into the hundreds, a mass of people marching and chanting for freedom, rule of law, an end to the three…

Happiness is £4 Million Pounds

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While working to become a full-time reporter at an online publication in Beijing in 2021, Cici Fenfeng Wu was tasked with covering the country’s real estate market. The property market contributed tremendously to China’s economic growth, as well as to its economic imbalance, and she was assigned to do a profile of one of the investors behind the market. No one in the industry was willing to speak with her except Ou Chengxiao, who at the time was one of the country’s biggest real estate speculators. He made his fortune…

Ski Racer Nina O’Brien’s Crazy Fast Comeback From an Olympic Crash

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Before she could think about walking normally, she had to practice using the small muscles in her calf to rotate her foot once again. The idea of pointing her foot and jamming it into a ski boot — a miserable experience for recreational skiers who wear relatively soft and flexible boots but a whole other level of awful for elite ski racers — seemed preposterous. She returned to Dartmouth, where she attends college in the off-season. She limped around campus, went to physical therapy nearly every day and tried to…