As Beijing battles outbreak, China warns ‘zero COVID’ doubters

BEIJING/SHANGHAI — Beijing residents fretted on Friday over tightening COVID curbs in its biggest district and dozens of new cases reported daily as China’s leaders reiterated their resolve to battle the virus and threatened action against critics of their strict measures.

Incurring a heavy economic cost and facing rare public criticism on its tightly-policed internet, China is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world where COVID restrictions are being abandoned and vaccines relied on to protect people.

Internationally, industry organisations have complained that China’s “zero-COVID” policies have global economic reverberations. At home, the population worries about painful, long-term restrictions.

In the latest ratcheting up of restrictions, Beijing authorities on Friday said all non-essential services in its biggest district Chaoyang, home to embassies and large offices, would shut. Mass testing will also resume in at least four districts over the weekend.

Meanwhile, organisers of the Asian Games, scheduled to take place in September in Hangzhou, southwest Shanghai, postponed them until 2023, because of COVID, defying a global sporting calendar that has largely returned to normal. The Chinese capital is racing to avoid an explosion in cases like the one that forced the commercial hub of Shanghai into an almost complete lockdown for more than a month, taking a financial and psychological toll on its residents.

“We will try to cooperate,” said 42-year-old Beijing finance worker Hu, giving only her surname.

“But I also hope that the government can introduce some policies that will not affect the overall life of citizens. After all, we all have mortgages and car loans.”

After a meeting of the highest decision-making body, the Standing Committee of the Communist Party’s politburo, state media reported late on Thursday that China would fight any comment or action that distorted, doubted or repudiated its COVID policy.

REUTERS

Picture: AP Picture: AP Picture: AP Anna Shevchenko, 35, waters the few flowers that survived in the garden of her home in Irpin, near Kyiv, on Tuesday. Inset: The mother of Oleksandr Mozheiko, 31, an Irpin Territorial Defence soldier killed by Russian army, cries at his grave at the cemetery of Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on Sunday, last week. Vehicles are on fire at an oil depot after missiles struck the facility in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Makiivka, east of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine on Wednesday.