Peking The 25 million metropolis of Shanghai is going into the corona lockdown in two phases. The districts east of the Huangpu River have been cordoned off since 5 a.m. Monday morning. The financial district and numerous industrial parks are located there.
The residents are not allowed to leave their apartments until Friday and will be tested extensively. From Friday, the downtown area west of the Huangpu River will be quarantined.
The city administration announced the measures late Sunday evening local time via its channel on the social media app Wechat. The lockdown came as a surprise, as rumors had been denied the day before.
The unexpected announcement had led to hamster purchases and long queues in front of supermarkets in the evening. Residential areas have been cordoned off.
Shops and factories that are not essential to life have to close, local transport is stopped. However, food and other goods should continue to be delivered by courier services if they can be handed over without contact.
The authorities are thus reacting to the sharp increase in the number of new infections over the weekend. 3450 new corona cases were reported for Sunday, most of them without symptoms.
All those infected must be placed in a centralized quarantine. Shanghai has been in partial lockdown for a good two weeks. However, it appears that this strategy is now seen as a failure and more stringent measures are being taken.
China reports record number of infections
A total of 6,215 new infections were recorded in China on Sunday – the highest number since the pandemic first broke out in central China’s Wuhan in early 2020.
“The failure of the targeted lockdown strategy is a major setback as Shanghai has been the proving ground for China to explore alternative models to minimize social costs,” Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. analysts Tommy Xie and Herbert Wong wrote. in a report. “This could delay China’s plan to ease its dynamic zero-Covid policy.”
Shanghai is one of China’s most important economic centers and is deeply integrated into global supply chains. The lockdown is therefore not only affecting the Chinese but also the global economy. Many German companies are also affected, says Maximilian Butek, head of the Shanghai branch of the German Chamber of Foreign Trade in China. This applies in particular to companies in the automotive, mechanical engineering, chemical, IT, pharmaceutical and service sectors.
The e-car manufacturer Tesla also had to suspend production. There are reports of employees in the financial industry staying overnight in their offices to continue working despite the lockdown. The Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing, on the other hand, said that operations at its factories in Shanghai have been running normally so far.
Worry about new problems in supply chains
With the lockdown in Shanghai, the concerns of the German economy about material and delivery bottlenecks are also growing. After all, China is by far their most important trading partner: goods worth 245.4 billion euros were traded between the two countries last year, 15.1 percent more than in the first corona year of 2020. Shanghai also has the largest port in the world and is the starting point many shipping routes.
“The already tense situation in the areas of logistics and supply chains is now being exacerbated by the current lockdown,” confirms AHK manager Butek. In addition, the “often unforeseeable measures implemented overnight and the consistent adherence to the zero case policy are increasingly worsening the investment climate in China,” he criticizes.
The continuing travel restrictions to China not only made it difficult to communicate with business partners and parent companies in Germany and abroad, but also to recruit and retain international talent. The number of foreign employees in companies is constantly decreasing.
In order to test the population, public life will be shut down in two stages.
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(Foto: IMAGO/Xinhua)
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German companies are therefore waiting to see whether there will be a change in strategy or whether the government will stick to this approach. Statements by China’s head of state Xi Jinping in the middle of the month to reduce the economic impact of measures to combat the pandemic recently gave hope for an easing. But the current lockdown in Shanghai is destroying this for the time being.
A lockdown was ruled out by experts on Saturday. “Why can’t Shanghai be locked down? Because it is not only a city with residents, but also a city with an extremely important role in China’s economy,” said Wu Fan, an expert on the city’s top epidemic control team.
The second largest economy in the world after the USA is having trouble with the resurgence of the corona pandemic. At the beginning of the month, the authorities sealed off the tech metropolis of Shenzhen in southern China. It was the most economically important city to date to fall under such restrictions since the beginning of the pandemic.
More than 3,200 kilometers to the north, in Jilin, which borders Russia, the capital was locked down on March 11 and the entire province days later. The region, a hub of automobile production, remains locked down.
Note: An earlier version of the article incorrectly referred to “asymptomatic diseases”. We corrected the spot.
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