China to convene Congress, signals virus under control
BEIJING — China, taking a step toward a return to business as normal, announced Wednesday that its previously postponed national legislature session will be held in late May.
The National People’s Congress, delayed from early March because of the coronavirus outbreak, will start on May 22, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the 3,000 or so delegates would come to Beijing for what is the biggest political meeting of the year, or if it would be held virtually through videoconference.
A more than 2,000member advisory body that meets in tandem with the congress will start one day earlier on May 21, Xinhua reported.
“I’m not aware of the specifics, but I believe because of the epidemic, the two sessions this year will be somewhat different from other years,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said when asked if there would be any changes.
The twoweek annual meetings are largely ceremonial, with the legislature rubberstamping decisions reached earlier by Communist Party leaders, but in typical years they are a colorful spectacle in the nation’s capital.
The delegates to the congress normally descend on Beijing by plane and train and sit shouldertoshoulder in the colossal auditorium at the Great Hall of the People to hear a stateofthecountry address from the country’s No. 2 leader, Premier Li Keqiang.
The May 22 start date was announced at the end of a fourday meeting of the congress’s standing committee, which handles most legislative affairs when the congress is not in session. Of its 170 members, 47 participated remotely through online video.
With the epidemic situation improving and economic and social life gradually resuming, the conditions have been met for holding the session, a standing committee statement said, according to Xinhua.
The National Health Commission reported 22 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, including 21 that came from abroad and one in Guangdong province, the southern manufacturing hub bordering Hong Kong. That was an uptick from recent days but a sharp decline from the hundreds and even thousands of new cases being tallied daily until early March.
China has registered 82,858 cases and 4,633 deaths. Most were in the central city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected last last year.
Authorities have relaxed restrictions on going out but maintained strict quarantine rules on those coming from abroad or even other parts of the country to ward off a second wave of virus cases.