In Chinese megacities such as Shanghai and Beijing, it will get a little looser. Millions of workers in factories and other plants rushed to train stations and airports. They want to reach their home areas, to smaller towns and villages, where they once left in search of work. Together with them, additional oxygen generators (devices used for external blood oxygenation) reach hospitals in rural areas, and medical workers go from house to house and vaccinate the elderly against COVID-19.
China. Great commotion. Millions of workers are leaving cities
This exodus is associated with the Chinese New Year (otherwise known as the Spring Festival). It starts this year on Sunday, January 22. On this day, the Year of the Rabbit will begin. This public holiday, celebrated every year, is special for many, because after a few years the authorities abandoned the “zero COVID” policy and loosened pandemic restrictions.
New Year’s celebration is a public holiday in China, which lasts not one (as in our country) but seven days. For a full week (until January 27), the Chinese are off work – and the break in some places can last even longer, factories sometimes close for several weeks. It is also traditionally a period spent with family, at home, so Chinese people travel around the country in droves, wanting to visit relatives or the closest family, who often live very far away. This year, the occasion is unique, because many, due to restrictions, have not had a chance to meet their families for a long time.
These are the largest such annual migrations in the world, or at least they were until the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Such mass travel is possible for the first time in three years. According to government media reports, cited by Reuters, on Tuesday alone in one city, Shanghai, railway stations expected about 390,000 travelers. China’s transportation ministry forecasts that Chinese people will make 2.1 billion trips across the country between January 7 and February 15.
GDP with the second lowest growth in half a century
Celebrating the new year and all ¦wiêta Spring can help the economy. Consumer spending can move – on travel, tourism, gifts and other holidays shopping. On the other hand, many factories will shut down, some for a long time, which will also affect imports from the country. And it is not known what impact the increase in coronavirus infections will have on all this – the scale of which we do not know, because we do not have reliable data. However, it is possible that people leaving big cities, which have been centers of infection in recent weeks, will take COVID-19 relatives to their elderly, often unvaccinated relatives.
Tuesday, January 17 China published a series of data, including GDP growth in the last quarter of 2022 and the entire last year. They show that, on the one hand, the country is slowing down – the second largest economy ¶wiata grows slower than before and slower than she would like. On the other hand, it is still better than the expert committee expected. At the same time, in other monthly readings, e.g. on retail sales and industrial production for December, you can see a positive (for the economy, so far) impact of loosening covid restrictions. We wrote more about it at this link.
As he points out Dr. Michal Bogusz in a comment posted by Center for Eastern StudiesWhen it comes to the economy, the epidemiological situation will be crucial in China for the next six months. He noted that due to COVID-19, it is not known whether those who now go to visit their families will be able to return to work within 2-3 weeks after the holiday, as was the case in previous pre-covid years. “However, if there is a stabilization in this regard in late spring, then at the end of the second quarter or in the third one can expect an economic rebound in the PRC. This may give the false impression that the worst of the Chinese economy is over, but there are still unresolved structural problems: internal – such as debt, overinvestment, demographic crisis or speculative bubble on the market nieruchomo¶ci, and external – e.g. declining demand for Chinese goods, the trend of diversifying supply chains with China, supported by many governments, the war in Ukraine, and growing fears of deepening rivalry with the United States, emphasizes Dr. Bogusz. You can read the full commentary on the OSW website, at this link.
