While trying to walk on the frozen Liangma River in northeast Beijing, he answers the call. He is one of the few diplomats who stayed in China for the winter. He decided not to return to his hometown because it is his first year in the country, contrary to what many of his colleagues made of him. “Life has changed here, it is not the same as it was when I arrived,” he says.
The man works at one of the remaining embassies in Sanlitun. He arrived in October of last year. “I was able to travel to Shanghai to spend the end of the year,” he says. “I thought I wasn’t going to make it. but just when they removed several requirements, such as QR codes, I decided to organize the trip”, he narrates.
During the last month, the Asian country has announced changes to its ‘covid zero’ initiative, which has been applied for three years to mitigate cases and deaths from the pandemic. In his New Year’s message, President Xi Jinping was emphatic in saying that the country “has entered a new phase of attention to covid-19.” The new guidelines from the National Health Commission (CNS) indicate that the disease will be treated as a ‘class B’ infection, which implies, for example, that the number of mandatory PCR tests will be reduced.
In this way, the codes that had to be scanned before entering any establishment were no longer used. There was one that was an arrow that indicated the cities that were traveled to in the previous week and there was another, that was updated every 24 hours, that indicated the result of the nucleic acid test and the vaccinations. If any of those appeared in yellow or red, they could not be mobilized.
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Another important change is that as of today, January 8, 2023, the mandatory quarantine requirements for travelers arriving in the country are eliminated. They will only be asked for a negative result of a test carried out up to 48 hours before the trip.
“It’s a pretty good thing. We all thought it was going to be a little more staggered, but it was from one moment to the next. Now we can travel and move without fear of quarantines or the virus,” says David Rivera, a Colombian living in Beijing.
Travel without quarantines
These days, thousands of Chinese families are scheduled for the Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, the most traditional festival. The streets of the main cities have been busier, with a high traffic flow and people in the parks, despite the intense winter. Shopping centers, clubs and restaurants have once again been full. Anyone who arrived at this moment would skip the chapter on restrictions and control due to the pandemic that China was in for three years.
Since the beginning of 2020, reaching that country had become a challenge. Tourism was reduced to historic lows, businesses had to adapt to new virtual modalities, and the country ended up isolated in a kind of giant bubble that only a few could enter.
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Upon entering the country, a strict quarantine had to be carried out. At the beginning it was 14 days and with PCR tests in the nose. Then, around August 2022, the time was reduced to seven days in a center designated by the health authorities and three more days at home. By November, the time was shortened to the 5 + 2 model, that is, five days in a center and another two at home. As of today, this requirement is eliminated, as are tests upon landing.
The people in white —with biosafety suits, gloves, glasses, masks—, who welcomed and asked travelers to fill in data through WeChat, will be a thing of the past, or at least they will no longer be so present.
On the passports was put a QR code —the same one that is checked to leave the country— with the health data of each traveler. The departure from the airport was by groups of a maximum of ten people, to maintain the required distance. Some buses, with a plastic door between the driver and the chairs, were in charge of taking the passengers to the quarantine centers, which used to be hotels of various categories. Each person had to pay for lodging.
In those places, they disinfected everything with alcohol. You couldn’t get out of the rooms. In case of doing so, the quarantine time was restarted. The food was the same for everyone: breakfast, lunch, dinner, served in plastic containers. Garbage was to be left outside the room. To leave, all the PCR tests had to be negative and an additional code for the destination city had to be requested – this was one of the great challenges: each place requested a different QR code.
These measures were added to the regular confinements, which had become the daily bread, since it was an additional requirement to reach several cities. to enter beijing, for example, a quarantine and additional observation of up to a week had to be complied with. For this reason, many Chinese citizens stopped traveling around the country. Something particular that was not seen in other parts of the world is that in each neighborhood there was a tent to take the tests. It was mandatory to have one done at least every 72 hours, although on many occasions a daily one was required. Everything was registered in an application and a QR code, platforms that ceased to exist with the new changes.
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“The policy of ‘covid zero’ it is designed for a country like China, with 1,400 million inhabitants; It is not for another country with different conditions,” a member of the Communist Party of China explained to this newspaper.
People got used to that and to scanning the codes at the entrances of each establishment. “The hard part will be to avoid not thinking about doing everything they asked us to do,” says Victoria, a 46-year-old Chinese woman who plans to visit her relatives in Germany.
But that will remain in the records and in the memory of the citizens, and now we are entering a new stage. In the words of David Castrillón Kerrigan, a research professor at the Externado University: “The Government had begun with a reduction in restrictions months ago to test the health system in the face of an increase in cases. After that it was given full flexibility”.
Reopening of borders, boost to the economy
The country decided to reopen its borders again. International airport terminals, such as Daxing, in Beijing, or Pudong, in Shanghaithey were again busy with relatives waiting for the arrival of relatives from abroad, something that contrasts with what was seen for several months: empty corridors and rooms, and stopped planes.
The first two flights that took advantage of the changes in ‘covid zero’ it was one from China Southern Airlines, between Toronto (Canada) and Canton (China), and another from Singapore. Some 387 passengers were the first to arrive and not have to do mandatory quarantine as before.
After the announcement of the new measures, the demand for international tickets to travel to China skyrocketed. According to official data, the total number of exit and entry tickets purchased for January 8 increased by 628 percent, matching the peak recorded in March 2020, when millions of people tried to leave while restrictions were applied due to the pandemic.
The ‘Global Times’ newspaper reported that on the border with Vietnam, in Hekou, there has been a flow of people with flowers to meet friends and relatives who live in the other country. Similarly, with Hong Kong border crossings were enabled.
Analysts and organizations see this flexibility as an important point for the national economy. The Chinese government has said that with the “optimization” of the measures, “the economy is expected to grow faster.”
Forecasts from financial institutions, such as JP Morgan Asset Management, show that China’s GDP growth would rise to 5.4 percent in 2023, something in which the US investment bank Goldman Sachs agrees, according to recent reports.
For David Castrillón Kerrigan, “the change in the measures will improve the perception of international markets about the country. Despite the fact that the Chinese economy has grown, the measures had an impact on employment and tourism. Although China does not depend on tourism abroad, this can contribute to business confidence, as there were concerns from companies and individuals about the measures”.
New wave of infections
In China, people were often not afraid of the coronavirus, but of the restrictions. And that started from the fact that many were unaware of the virus and the disease, despite the fact that it began in that country. In Colombia, United States and European countries, when talking to anyone, it was highly likely that they would say that they or one of their relatives or friends had been infected; in the Asian country, that did not happen.
But that changed. With the easing of measures, in the last month, China has experienced an increase in cases and deaths from covid-19. Reports from residents and journalists in various cities, such as Tianjin or Hangzhou, have realized that thousands of citizens have been infected. “My family and my friends got infected. A relative went to eat at the house of some colleagues and after a few days he tested positive. He had visited us,” says a young man named Lee, who lives in Shanghai.
Official reports reported 5,000 cases a day, but the West has questioned the records. Airfinity, the health risk analysis firm, has said daily cases are estimated at 1.8 million. Regarding deaths, since December 7, 2022, China reported about twenty deaths from the disease and then changed the criteria to determine which had been caused by covid-19, which raised concerns. However, Airfinity has ensured that the number of deaths could have been as high as 9,000 each day.
The truth is that the map of what is happening at the national level is not clear. Records from Zhejiang province show that one million people had been infected a week in the past month, and cities such as Quzhou and Zhoushan have established that at least 30 percent of their population had been infected. A statement from the Chinese government ensures that Beijing has passed the peak of infections and that “It is closely monitoring the situation in other cities.”
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The World Health Organization He asserted that official statistics did not show the real impact of the virus in the country. In response, the Chinese government spokeswoman, mao ningHe said that “the epidemic situation is under control” and the country has “transparently” shared the data on the pandemic, and that he hopes that “the WHO will maintain a scientific and impartial position.”
Once the easing was announced, about twenty countries, such as Japan, Italy, Malaysia, India, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Israel and the United States, reported restrictions for Chinese travelers. “It is incompatible with the new situation of covid-19 and current global practices”said the Chinese government.
(Read: Which countries have imposed restrictions on those traveling from China?)
The focus now is on vaccination. Official data shows that more than 3,400 million anticovid vaccines have been administered in the country and more than 90 percent of the population has the complete scheme. The authorities expect 2.1 billion trips to be made this season, double the number registered in 2021.
DAVID ALEJANDRO LOPEZ BERMUDEZ
Multimedia Reporting Journalist
In social networks: @lopez03david
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