China partially stopped issuing visas to citizens of South Korea on Tuesday (10) – days after reopening its borders after three years of isolation. The move is seen as a response to Seoul’s announcement that it would require negative Covid-19 tests from travelers from Beijing amid the coronavirus outbreak experienced by the dictatorship since it relaxed its Covid-zero policy late last year. .
While China has imposed testing requirements on new arrivals similar to those now required by South Korea, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the South Korean measure was discriminatory and that his country would act reciprocally. The first of these acts was implemented this Tuesday, when the Chinese embassy in Seoul suspended the issuing of South Korean visas for short-term trips to China.
Something similar happened in Japan after it established restrictions on the entry of Chinese. According to the Kyodo news agency, China would have alerted a number of local travel agencies that it would stop issuing new visas to Japanese people. Questioned by Reuters, the Chinese embassy in Tokyo neither confirmed nor denied the information.
South Korea and Japan weren’t the only nations to impose restrictions on passengers from China since it announced the resumption of international travel. The list includes more than ten other countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and Italy, which have expressed concern that the high transmission of Covid observed in the Asian giant will now give rise to new variants, capable of evading current vaccines. Sanitarians say that the measure adopted by these countries – requiring negative tests before boarding or upon arrival at the airport – is not enough to contain new infections.
The scenario is aggravated by the fact that the regime has stopped publishing official figures on infections and deaths due to the coronavirus. The blackout was criticized by the WHO (World Health Organization), which said that the current numbers underrepresent the real impact of the disease – the British data company Airfinity Daily estimates that today the country registers, daily, about 3 million cases. and 18,900 deaths.
Chinese authorities deny that the decision to stop publishing data was politically motivated. “Since the outbreak, China has taken an open and transparent attitude,” Wang said. State media has also claimed that the peak of Covid has passed, with infections decreasing in the capital and in several provinces across the country.
The principle of reciprocity had already been evoked by China when the first countries announced restrictions on travelers from the country. At the time, a spokesman for diplomacy said that the nation was willing to improve communication with the world, but was firmly opposed to attempts to “manipulate epidemic prevention and control measures for political ends” and that it would take “the necessary actions correspondents”.
It should be noted, however, that determinations such as those imposed by China on South Korea and Japan have not been applied to any Western country. A researcher at Fudan University, in Shanghai, Karin Vazquez, recalls that the regime’s ties with Seoul are very different from those maintained, for example, with the United States —both in economic and political terms. Acting in a similar way towards Americans would not be perceived as reciprocity, but as an affront.
Furthermore, creating more difficulties for foreigners to enter would not only represent a kind of resumption of the Covid-zero policy —quickened somewhat abruptly, after a wave of protests with few precedents—, but would also go against what Vazquez describes as a regime’s attempt to propose a positive agenda by reconnecting with the world.
“The whole positive wave of opening the economy and borders would go down the drain, as well as how much the party and Xi Jinping can capitalize on top of it”, says the researcher.
She warns that, even so, it is possible that it is only a matter of time before China uses the principle of reciprocity to bar visitors from countries that have imposed restrictions on citizens coming from their country. But that would come at a huge political cost — and the strains in that area, which include but are not limited to the pandemic, have already had major impacts on the Chinese economy in recent years.
The strain in China’s diplomatic relations with South Korea and Japan does not seem to have diminished the optimism of Asian markets regarding the reopening of borders. Before the pandemic, Chinese used to spend about $250 billion a year abroad.
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