More Chinese Cities Under Lockdowns

More Chinese Cities Locked Down Under Strict ‘Zero-COVID’ Measures

Alex Wu

China has put several more of its cities and tens of millions of residents under new lockdowns, including the world’s largest wholesale hub and port cities. Many travelers are now stranded and struggling for food, production orders have been canceled, and businesses are closing because of the Chinese regime’s strict “zero-COVID” measures.

According to Chinese media, since early August, a new wave of COVID-19 has swept through 25 of China’s 31 provinces, spanning from the southernmost HainanProvince to the Xinjiang region and Tibet in the west.

Yiwu city in the eastern Zhejiang Province, which is the world’s largest wholesale hub, has been under a partial lockdown since early August, when new cases caused by the more infectious Omicron variant of COVID-19 were reported. On Aug. 11, authorities put the city in a three-day full lockdown, using the more than 500 reported cases as justification for the measure.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese regime has concealed the real scale of its outbreaks and has long been suspected as underreporting the number of cases in the country. Meanwhile, the regime uses reported outbreaks to implement strict control measures, such as city-wide lockdowns and mandatory testing.

Under the full lockdown in Yiwu, public places are closed, trains are suspended, and residents are barred from leaving their homes. Businesses have been forced to stop operating; many small and medium-sized enterprises have complained of heavy losses. The “live streaming sales center” Jiangbei Xiazhu stopped shipping goods in early August, and hundreds of foreign businessmen were unable to go to the Yiwu market to purchase goods.

A new COVID-19 outbreak has been reported in the city of Zhuhai, in south China’s Guangdong Province, which is a production center for electronics in the Pearl River Delta, a major economic area of China.

Since May when China locked down many areas and cities, including financial center Shanghai to “dynamically clear COVID-19,” a large number of orders from foreign countries have been canceled. That led to many private enterprises in the Pearl River Delta announcing they would close their businesses before the end of August, since they could no longer afford to continue, while many factories put workers on unpaid “vacations” ranging from days to several months.

After Sanya, a port city at the southern point of Hainan Island which is known as “China’s Hawaii,” was put under city-wide lockdown on Aug. 4, leaving more than 80,000 tourists stranded, authorities locked down the provincial capital Haikou on Aug. 8. Haikou is an important industrial port for the South China Sea.

Public transportation has been halted, all residents are required to take PCR tests and aren’t allowed to leave their residential compounds, and all inbound and outbound flights have been canceled.