[The country is experiencing its
worst coronavirus flare-up since last summer, testing the government’s success
in subduing the disease.]
They locked down two cities with
more than 17 million people, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a crash
testing regime of nearly every resident there, which was completed in a matter
of days.
They shut down transportation and
canceled weddings, funerals and, most significantly, a provincial Communist
Party conference.
By this week the lockdowns expanded
to include another city on the edge of Beijing, Langfang, as well as a county
in Heilongjiang, a northeastern province. Districts in Beijing itself, the
Chinese capital, also shut down.
More than 22 million people in all
have been ordered to remain inside their homes — double the number affected
last January when China’s central government locked down Wuhan, the central
city where the virus was first reported, in a move that was then seen
as extraordinary.
The flare-ups remain small compared
with the devastation facing other countries, but they threaten to undercut the
success the country’s Communist Party has had in subduing the virus,
allowing its
economy to surge back after last year’s slump and its people to return
to something close to normal
lives.
The urgency of the government’s
current response stands in contrast to that of officials in Wuhan last year
who feared
a backlash if they disclosed the mysterious new illnesses then
emerging. Local officials there had gone ahead with a Communist Party
conference like the one now canceled in Hebei, despite knowing the risk of the
disease spreading among people.
Since Wuhan, the authorities
have created
a playbook that mobilizes party cadres to quickly respond to new
outbreaks by sealing off neighborhoods, conducting widespread testing and
quarantining large groups when needed.
“In the process of infectious
disease prevention and control, one of the key points is to seek truth from
facts, to openly and transparently release epidemic information and never to
allow covering up or underreporting,” the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, said at
a meeting on Friday of the State Council, China’s cabinet.
China, a country of 1.4 billion
people, has reported an average of 109 new cases a day over the past week,
according to a New
York Times database. Those would be welcome numbers in countries
experiencing far worse — including the United States, which is averaging more
than 250,000 new cases a day — but they are the worst in China since last
summer.
China’s National Health Commission
has not reported any new deaths, but the World Health Organization, which uses
information from China, has recorded 12
so far in 2021. The National Health Commission did not respond to requests to
explain the discrepancy.
In Hebei, the province where the
new outbreak has been concentrated, officials last week declared a “wartime
state” that shows no sign of lifting soon.
Throughout the pandemic, officials
have appeared especially worried about Beijing, home of the Communist Party’s
central leadership. Last week, the party secretary in Hebei, Wang Dongfeng,
pledged to make sure the province was “the moat to safeguard Beijing’s
political security.”
The outbreaks, coming after so long
with minimal cases, have increased anxiety across China, where residents in
most places felt like the pandemic was a thing of the past.
New cases have also been reported
in the northern province of Shanxi and the northeastern provinces of
Heilongjiang and Jilin. Shanghai on Wednesday urged residents not to leave the
city and announced that people who had traveled to risky areas should
quarantine themselves at home for two weeks and leave only after passing two
tests, while those who had traveled to the highest-risk areas faced quarantine
in government facilities.
In Wuhan, rumors swirled that the
city could face a new lockdown; while those appeared unfounded, officials
noticeably stepped up temperature checks on some streets.
In Shunyi, a district in Beijing’s
northeast that includes Beijing Capital International Airport as well as rural
villages, residents have been ordered to remain inside since a surge of cases
just before the new year. At Beijing’s main railroad stations, workers sprayed
down public spaces with disinfectant.
After a taxi driver tested positive
over the weekend in Beijing, the authorities tracked down 144 passengers for
additional tests, according to The
Global Times, a state tabloid. Now anyone getting in a taxi or car service
in Beijing has to scan a QR code from their phone, allowing the government to
quickly trace them.
The government has moved
ahead on plans to vaccinate
50 million people ahead of the Lunar New Year next month, a holiday
when hundreds of millions of people traditionally crisscross the country to
visit their families. By Wednesday, more than 10 million doses had been
distributed.
Even with the vaccinations,
officials have already warned people not to travel ahead of the holiday.
“These measures, if well implemented,
can ensure that no large-scale epidemic rebound occurs,” Feng Zijian, the
deputy director of China’s Center for Disease Control, said at a briefing in
Beijing on Wednesday.
While the new restrictions have
inconvenienced millions, there appears to be no significant public resistance
to them.
“As far as I am concerned, I think
measures like a lockdown for the whole city are actually quite good,” said Zhao
Zhengyu, a university student in Beijing who is now confined to her parents’
home in Shijiazhuang, where she was visiting during winter break when the
outbreak there erupted.
Many in the city feared a repeat of
Wuhan’s lockdown, but she sounded unfazed.
Ms. Zhao’s parents now work from
home, picking up groceries only from a market in their residential compound.
She lamented that she could not meet friends or study in the library but said
learning online has become routine.
“Perhaps we have gotten used to
it,” she said.
The response underscored how
quickly the government mobilizes its resources to contain outbreaks.
After the lockdown was announced in
Shijiazhuang on Jan. 6, the authorities collected more than 10 million
coronavirus test samples over the next three days — nearly one for every
resident, officials said at a news conference in the city. Those tests turned up
354 positive results, though some of the cases were asymptomatic.
A second round of mass nucleic acid
testing began on Tuesday.
“In effect, this is a kind of
wartime system — using the means of wartime for social control in peacetime —
and during a pandemic this wartime system works,” said Chen Min, a writer and
former newspaper editor who goes by the pen name Xiao Shu. Mr. Chen was in
Wuhan last year when the city went into lockdown.
The nature of the country’s
governance gave it the tools to tackle the epidemic — even if some measures
seemed over the top.
“Chinese cities enforce a
residential system — smaller ones have several hundred residents, big ones have
tens of thousands — and by shutting the gates you can lock in tens of thousands
of people,” Mr. Chen said in a telephone interview. “Now whenever they run into
this kind of problem, they’re sure to apply this method. That would be
impossible in Western countries.”
Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher
contributed reporting. Claire Fu contributed research.
