Minutes after leaving for school, Humberto Monteiro’s 13-year-old daughter, 57, returned home. While waiting for the bus, the girl received a mobile phone notification that the school had suspended classes amid new restrictions implemented by Beijing authorities to stop the spread of Covid-19.
“We find out at the last minute. For now the situation is more or less calm, but when I saw everyone with full grocery bags on Monday [25]I ran to stock up, because I felt the bug was going to catch”, says the Ceará native who has lived in China for 23 years. In the Chinese capital, where he runs a Brazilian steakhouse, he has been tested for Covid-19 every other day. .
Beijing has been following the roadmap that other cities in the country are familiar with since the omicron variant of the coronavirus broke through rigid control barriers and put to the test the “Covid zero” policy, according to which no level of contamination is acceptable.
This Wednesday (27), the government confirmed 34 new cases in the city of almost 22 million inhabitants. Condominiums where contamination is confirmed have been closed, schools suspended classes and, in some regions, authorities recommend, for now, avoiding leaving the house for non-essential activities.
This is what the regime called the “dynamic zero Covid policy”, which it has adopted since the middle of last year, in which it punctually isolates areas with records of the disease before enacting a city-wide lockdown. The strategy causes discomfort: in the last week, for example, everyone who passed through a Beijing mall had to isolate themselves at home for ten days after a single customer had a reported case.
What scares the population is that this was the route adopted in economic centers in the country, such as Shenzhen and Shanghai – but the two were unable to contain the disease only with one-off measures and then had to enact strict quarantines. In the second, the situation has been going on for weeks, amid popular dissatisfaction and protests on social networks, triggered after complaints of disorganization by municipal authorities and shortages, in addition to a controversial policy, now abandoned, of separating parents from infected children.
The fear of the Pekingese is that the same will happen in the capital. Analysts, however, point out that the communist regime’s actions should be more restrained in Beijing, especially after the negative repercussions of the Shanghai lockdown.
“Control of a number of things in China has become much tighter than usual in recent times, and that includes control over the pandemic,” says Jiangnan Zhu, a professor of political science at the University of Hong Kong. “For Beijing, however, the response to recent Covid-19 cases is more likely to be conducted more cautiously.”
This is because in the second half of this year the capital will host the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party, in which current leader Xi Jinping is expected to confirm an unprecedented third term. The most powerful figure in the Chinese regime since Deng Xiaoping, Xi managed to abolish the two-term limit at the head of the country in 2018, paving the way to remain in power indefinitely.
There are still bureaucratic issues, however, such as changes to party statutes that stipulate that only one re-election is tolerated and that place age limits on members of the Politburo, one of Organs most important bodies in China’s power hierarchy.
A likely third term still faces resistance from key figures such as former premier Zhu Rongji. In this scenario, all Xi does not want is to see movements of desperate people screaming out the window or orchestrated actions on social networks to criticize the regime erupt in Beijing, as happened in Shanghai.
The situation in the city remains challenging, even leading to speculation about a possible change in municipal administration. China’s financial hub recorded 13,562 new cases this Wednesday and 48 deaths – bringing the sum of the last ten days to 238. April last year, a moving average of 220 deaths), but it is considered disastrous in China.
Meanwhile, Beijing residents decided to take precautions.
Humberto Monteiro, the Brazilian owner of a steakhouse in the city, thinks that there is still no reason to despair, but just in case he stocked up on food for at least a month: he bought pork, beef, chicken and duck, in addition to rice, pasta and many frozen foods to support the house where he lives with his wife and three children.
He lives in Chaoyang, the capital’s most populous district, with 3.5 million people, which first announced that it would test the entire population three times this week — another ten districts followed suit and said they would also carry out mass testing campaigns.
The steakhouse, called Brazilian Churrasco, is located in a hotel that also operated four other restaurants, which are now closed. “As foreign tourists have not entered the country and recently not even Chinese have stayed there anymore, the movement has dropped a lot”, he says.
There was an expectation that tourism would revive on the 1st of May — the Labor Day holiday extends the celebrations for a few days and forms an especially important date for the sector — but the city hall has already ordered travel agencies to suspend tours to the capital and began to require tests to enter the city.
Also in the food sector, Dino Dabach, 52, a partner at another restaurant in Beijing, stocked up on food for two months, with meat, chicken, canned goods and less perishable products. “I don’t want what happened to my colleagues in Shanghai, who face a difficult situation,” he says.
The businessman saw blocks close to his house close after the confirmation of cases of the disease, but so far he has been unharmed by the virus. He says that the lockdown in Shanghai still has an economic impact: with the difficulty of obtaining products, especially meat, from abroad, amid congestion at the port of the financial hub, his spending has grown by around 30% in recent months.
