Covid lockdown panic grips Beijing

Beijing officials have begun testing more than 20 million people in an urgent attempt to stop China’s capital joining Shanghai in a citywide lockdown.

Shoppers empty shelves at a supermarket in Chaoyang District, Beijing. Picture: Getty Images

Beijing officials have begun testing more than 20 million people in an urgent attempt to stop China’s capital joining Shanghai in a citywide lockdown.

A cascade of lockdowns throughout China has forced international economists to lower their growth forecasts for the world’s second-biggest economy.

Panicked Beijingers emptying supermarket shelves have further spooked global markets. The cluster in the capital has grown to 80 cases.

Shanghai on Tuesday declared 52 Covid deaths, the highest daily number in China since Wuhan’s original outbreak more than two years ago.

That took the official tally for Shanghai’s outbreak to 190, a number supporters of Xi Jinping’s “Covid zero” policy said proved the necessity of that strict approach.

Many experts outside China believe the official death tally from the outbreak has been suppressed by China’s much more limited definition of what counts as a Covid death.

“The problem is how they count Covid-caused death – symptoms of pneumonia appear to be still the defining criteria in the city,” said Yanzhong Huang, ­director of the Centre for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University.

Shanghai is now in the second month of a lockdown of extraordinary severity that has stalled the economy in China’s financial hub and led to widespread food shortages.

Mr Xi’s Covid enforcer, Sun Chunlan, has vowed to do whatever it takes to bring the Omicron outbreak under control. Another 17,000 cases were declared on Tuesday.

The latest addition to Mr Sun’s Covid repression toolkit is the erection of “hard quarantines” (“ying geli”), makeshift fences built around the entrances of apartment buildings.

Many complained online that the barricades were a fire risk.

“Could we also put fences around the homes of Shanghai leaders?” said one on Chinese social media website Weibo.

Covid test queues in Beijing. Picture: AFP

Beijing has clearly signalled Mr Xi’s signature “Covid zero” policy will not change before China’s leader secures his third five-year term as leader at the end of the year.

City officials around the country have responded by implementing sharp lockdowns with increasing zeal.

Farmers in Liaoning province, in China’s northeast, have been instructed to plough fields in hazmat suits.

Baotou, a city of almost three million people in Inner Mongolia, has just been put into a week-long lockdown after it reported two cases of Covid. The city is a key hub for the rare earth and coal industry.

Most attention is now on China’s political capital.

Mr Xi did not mention the tense situation during a visit on Monday to Beijing’s Renmin University, where he was greeted by crowds of cheering unmasked students.

Instead, the focus of the Chinese leader’s visit was the importance of “ideological-political” training, a longstanding focus of his time in power.

“Xi stressed following the party’s leadership and passing down revolutionary traditions in running universities,” China’s ­official news agency reported.

Chinese state media reports on the visit did not mention the quarantine arrangements that confine university students to their campuses.

Students at Renmin have not been allowed to leave their campus for months, except for rare ­exceptions such as health reasons.

At many Chinese universities, teachers and other support staff – including cleaners and security guards – are now living on their university campuses. Some sleep on mats under their desks.

Xi Jinping at Renmin University. Picture: Xinhua

A student studying in central China said his entire university had been in lockdown for almost two months. He expects the confinement will continue until he graduates in June.

“We don’t know what to do about the situation,” he told The Australian.

The university does not allow the delivery of online goods. Chinese officials have blamed traces of the virus on parcels for Covid’s spread in the country, a transmission path discredited by scientists outside China.

The student said he and his classmates were worried about their job prospects in China’s Covid-constrained economy.

Another 33 Covid cases were declared in Beijing on Tuesday, tiny by international standards but enough to have triggered a lockdown in any mainland city other than China’s centre of political power.

Officials have told residents not to leave the city for the upcoming five-day May public holiday and flights from Beijing’s airports have been cancelled.

Fears that harsher measures are to come have seen Beijing’s grocery shops cleared of goods.

Beijing-based lawyer Yi Shenghua said the ongoing trouble in Shanghai – which previously had a reputation as the most competent in China – showed that nowhere in the country was safe from blunt, citywide lockdowns.

“The management problems exposed in Shanghai are shocking,” he said. “If Shanghai is like this, how can I believe that other cities will do better than Shanghai?”