Shanghai and Xinjiang used to be the two sides of the China coin. Shanghai was the glamorous China, with skyscrapers, Art Deco apartments and a thriving middle class that shopped in Paris and strolled around Kyoto, Japan. Xinjiang was the dark China. The western frontier region, which is twice the size of Texas, is home to more than 10 million Muslim ethnic minorities who have been subject to mass detentions, religious repression and intrusive digital and physical surveillance. Since April, the 25 million residents of Shanghai have gotten a small…
Tag: Shanghai (China)
China’s Covid Lockdowns Leave Millions Out of Work
After over a month in lockdown, Zeng Jialin could finally return to the Shanghai auto parts factory where he had worked. He was about to be released from a quarantine facility, having recovered from Covid, and was desperate to make up for the many days of wages he had missed. But on Tuesday, the day he was supposed to be released, someone in the crowded isolation facility tested positive again. Mr. Zeng, 48, was ordered to wait 14 more days. “I have three kids, in college, middle school and elementary…
Beijing’s Covid Lockdowns: Close to My Home
Beijing’s Covid Lockdowns: Close to My Home Keith Bradsher�� Reporting from Beijing Keith Bradsher/The New York Times When the authorities admitted on April 24 that the city had a problem, residents quickly emptied supermarket shelves. With the city’s help, businesses fully restocked, and stockpiling by residents has slowed. NYT
Your Tuesday Briefing: Beijing’s Fight against Lockdowns
Good morning. We’re covering the reopening of a mass-isolation center in Beijing, the evacuation of Ukrainian civilians from Mariupol and the forced closure of Rohingya schools in Bangladesh. A mass isolation center reopens Beijing reopened the Xiaotangshan hospital, which has more than 1,000 beds, after recording a few hundred cases in recent weeks. On Monday, officials announced 50 new cases in the city of 22 million, down from the 59 reported on Sunday. The move appears to be aimed at avoiding the fate of Shanghai, where weeks of confinement have…
Inside China’s Zero-Covid Fortress, Xi Jinping Admits No Doubts
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, waved at crowds of giddily cheering students. He held meetings with Olympic Games officials, economic policymakers and European leaders. He toured a tropical island. But there was a revealing gap in Mr. Xi’s busy itinerary last month, exposing the predicament that Covid is creating in a politically crucial year when he hopes to extend his hold on power. He stayed behind the scenes when it came to China’s biggest, most contentious lockdown since the pandemic began. Throughout April, Mr. Xi gave no public speeches focused on…
Hunting for the next virus
Searching for the next virus The Covid-19 pandemic is not over yet, but some researchers are already worrying about mousepox. Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, has spent the last few years training computers to predict which dangerous viruses could jump from animals to humans, following in the footsteps of the coronavirus (which came from bats), H.I.V. (chimpanzees) and hundreds of other pathogens. His team used machine learning to develop a short list of potentially dangerous viruses that could eventually make a leap. Mousepox — a virus that infects…
Under Lockdown in China
At the height of China’s worst Covid outbreak, the authorities in Shanghai took over gleaming high-rise office buildings and turned them into mass isolation centers. Floor after floor, room after room, the buildings were filled with people, their beds arranged in tight rows. Those buildings, and the broader lockdown of Shanghai, reinforced the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s power to marshal resources in its quest to eliminate Covid. But they also fueled deep frustration with the government’s failures and overreach. In eastern Shanghai, police officers in white protective suits clashed with…
Your Thursday Briefing: Russia Cuts Gas Supplies
Good morning. A gas crisis looms over Europe, anger grows in Shanghai and Singapore executes an intellectually disabled man. Russia cuts gas supplies to Europe In its toughest response yet to European sanctions, Russia halted natural gas shipments to Bulgaria and Poland. The E.U.’s top official denounced the move as “blackmail,” but European officials said they were prepared to weather the near-term impact: Poland’s gas storage facilities are 75 percent full, and it has been working for years to avoid being held to ransom by Moscow over energy. Germany also…
Beijing’s Testing Surge
Beijing’s testing surge Beijing is racing to test nearly all of its 22 million residents three times over five days in a high-stakes bid to avoid a similar fate as Shanghai, where millions of residents have been forced into an almost unbearable monthlong lockdown. Today millions of Beijing residents took their second round of tests, and officials from the Chinese capital announced that they had uncovered an additional 46 cases. The city identified three more neighborhoods today as high-risk and four more as medium-risk, designations that both prompt lockdowns. Overall,…
Beijing Has 138 Covid Cases. It Musters 139,000 Workers to Test Residents.
BEIJING — Shanghai appeared on Wednesday to be making gradual progress in bringing coronavirus outbreaks under control, while Beijing continued finding more cases as it tries to test three times over five days nearly all of the capital’s 22 million residents. Shanghai announced its lowest total for new cases in weeks: 12,309. Only 171 of those were detected among people still in the broader community. The rest were among people already in isolation as the contacts of previously infected people, and were less likely to infect others, according to municipal…